by CJ Hauser
She heard a sound like a cry and without thinking opened the door to Nolan’s room, where it had come from. In the bed, she saw the forms beneath the covers clutch into one ball, like a startled beetle.
What— Ingrid said. She still felt the happiness of the wine and the evening and the trees of her dream sounding within her, so this cold, new feeling took a moment to trickle in. The children’s faces appeared above the comforter, unfurling.
What— Ingrid said, and she understood.
Elsa said, Mom, don’t—
But Ingrid held up her hand. She could not handle this alone. There were three parents. They outnumbered the children. She could handle this so long as there were three parents. She turned and stumbled down the hall to find Ian and Keiko.
Ingrid left, and the sound of voices from the other bedroom murmured and then there was shouting, then hushing. Nolan began to cry. He felt so small and wrong. Soon, they would come down the hall. Soon, trouble was coming. Or something worse than trouble. Something new.
Elsa whispered in his ear: Stop crying, New Baby.
Don’t call me that, Nolan said.
It’s okay, Elsa said. Ian’s not my real dad.
Just stop, Nolan said.
It’s true. I found out this week. You and I aren’t actually related at all.
No, Nolan said.
He cried harder. Nolan was relieved and horrified. But the invisible genes that did not link him and Elsa did not matter so much as the words that did. And he understood then that he could have kept Elsa as a sister or slept with her. It was a choice, and what he’d just done was to have given her up. Nolan had not meant to choose, but he had, and he had chosen wrong. It was a thing that could not be undone.
The parents were still talking in the next room. Nolan pulled at the flannel comforter. Why did no one come for them?
If we’re not related, it’s not wrong, Elsa insisted. I’m not your sister.
Nolan felt a new rush of sickness as he considered that the feeling of unconditional acceptance he had felt with Elsa by the pool was tied to her being his sister. That it was the comfort of siblings he had wanted, wanted more than the sex, but now, by sleeping with Elsa, he’d ensured that he would never get to feel that way again.
He had traded something rare for something cheap, and he had lost her. They had lost each other.
II
Darwin Walking Backward
A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself…out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap…all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings…moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand.
“A Sound of Thunder”
Ray Bradbury
10
You are in a town but you are always on an island.
You can crawl over an island’s surface, small moth on a hot glass bulb.
You can fling yourself against it, try to immolate yourself in understanding.
But you will crack yourself open before an island lets you in.
9
Back in time, that second night on the island, when the night birds had been calling. When Elsa returned to bed and Nolan was asleep, his hair looped in a bun. When Elsa had raked her fingers along his skull, pulling his hair free. When it had spilled across the pillow.
Nolan woke.
It was hot, so he sat up and pulled off his shirt. The bed smelled like a body. He had sweat into these sheets, and now here was Elsa’s smell, something elemental. The green humus of a riverbed.
Nolan gathered his hair at the nape of his neck. Elsa ran her fingers through, pulling it free again.
They turned to each other.
Her ample form. His long, slender one. It was dark and there was nothing to say.
They shouldn’t be so close. But the island didn’t care. Leap’s was out of time, the twenty-ninth of February, and their ears still hummed from the whirring of the generator—or was it the legions of bugs, or was it was the moon’s neon-sign drone, or was it the water that looked still at night but was always moving?
Maybe it was the sound of their two charged bodies, so long kept apart, which now clung to each other for comfort. They went no further. They went this far.
And who was there to care that they lay like this?
On this island?
The ghost of Ian Grey.
Wasn’t this the surest way to make him reappear?
If there was any way to conjure their father, to force a resurrection, this was it. Elsa pressed back into Nolan, and he curved around her, jutting his knees up behind her legs, snaking his arms around her. She bit his arm. He smacked the flat of her thigh. She bit him harder.
It was a game. A dare. What could they make happen?
Ian?
Olly olly oxen free.
8
Farther back:
Every wave of tenants had sought to escape their mainland lives on the island. The Reversalists were only the most recent inheritors of its wildness.
In a muddy inlet, a frog braapped a call, his gullet pulsing full and ripe as he summoned partners from the forest.
The ducks were molting. Earlier this year than last. A family huddled together on the stream bank, and their down was swept away in the current.
The woods at the center of the island were dense with trees and fast-sprawling shrubs. The canopy made the darkness in the lower layers absolute, except for the moonlight on the skins of berries on bushes, plump and full of poison.
Walking paths had been trampled through the brush by Reversalists moving from shacks to the Lobby. Some Reversalists spray-painted personal blazes. Orange to Gwen Manx’s house. Blue to Esther’s and Gates’s. Metallic silver to St. Gilles’s. The miniature deer who lived on the island, blunt-faced with stubby horns, abandoned their tunnels through the greenway and gleefully trotted along the humans’ trails. They frisked in the cleared space. Rutted in the soil. Rubbed the velvet off their antlers against the trees, sometimes erasing the spray-painted blazes the scientists had put there.
It rained and everyone on the island heard the sound against the metal roofs of their shacks. They listened to the heavy rustle of fat raindrops crashing through the canopy leaves, pinging off the roofs, and the sound was like the ticking of a giant, erroneous clock that could not keep the time.
7
Ian Grey is stumbling, naked, on the beach. He has gleefully flung off his clothes; he will not need them now. His long white thighs glow in the moonlight. He has realized what he must do. He is wearing his glasses and he looks up at the moon. He does not need glasses to see the moon, so he tosses these away as well. Ian looks behind him at the wood. He looks in front of him at the ocean. The Gulf is green and frothing. He takes a step forward. Yes, this is correct.
Ian Grey steps into the tide so it laps at his ankles. The sand caves in a little, and soon it is gathering around his feet, a reclamation. Ian Grey in the water, the primordial soup! Ian Grey going back going back going back. Like every generation before him, he’d risen, and now his turn was up. And why not. Let him recede. How much good had they done anyway?
The smell off the Gulf is brackish and fertile, and it really is a perfect night to be like a duck in the sea. He wades deeper into the water and it closes warmly over his thighs his balls his belly the small curve of his back his nipples his chin. Such a perfect night! Don’t ruin it.
He paddles in the water, heading away from shore.
Ian gets tired. He goes under. He thinks that perhaps this is like a
dream where he does not think he can breathe underwater but if he takes just one mouthful, lets it cycle through his lungs, yes, then he will adapt and he will breathe the water just as easily as he’d ever breathed the air. He gulps a little and the heaviness and burning panics him. He struggles to the surface and coughs. He goes under and comes up. Under and up. He is so tired. But he chose this, didn’t he? He is almost asleep, and then there is a noise.
A boat with a group of laughing young people in bright swimsuits playing cheerful music motors near him. Ian tries to say something but cannot. He beats his arms, but they give out and he goes under again.
In spite of himself, he thinks:
Maybe the children will save him.
The boaters in colorful shorts chortle and sing, and they do not hear Ian.
Of course they don’t. It is only natural that they should leave him behind. Only natural that he should give himself up and let these young people have a go. Make room, make way for what comes next.
Ian cries out in delight: Children!
The noise of their thumping music drowns him out as they steer the boat away and back to the far shore.
6
It was a year between when the Reversalists came and when Mitchell first returned to the ruins of the Leap-Backer’s commune, dope sick and in search of anything like a home.
(Later, the old commune postman would come in his boat with the letter from the lawyer turning over the Townes inheritance to him. Later, the first scientists would respond to the letters Mitchell sent promising them free housing and resources for research. But before that, it was a long year.)
Mitchell spent his first weeks back detoxing, dreaming and puking, in his parents’ old shack, and during that time he turned furious. Furious with them for abandoning him at the hospital. Furious with them for not being here now, when he’d finally got back.
In his fury, Mitchell wanted to erase every trace of them, and all the Leap-Backers, from the island.
He forced himself to work sooner than he was ready—tearing down the old shacks. Rehabilitating the ruined gardens to feed himself. He worked in the sun in his shorts, and he turned a shade of brown that always seemed to have an angry redness underneath. He collected everything the Leap-Backers had left behind, and he burned it in giant fires on the beach at night.
He burned dreamcatchers and bassinets and sarongs. He burned the I Ching and the Bible and The Prophet and Walden and Self-Reliance and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He shouted at the blaze. He burned everything in his father’s office. All the minutes of community meetings, all the declarations of reconciliation and proposals for peace, all the children’s poems about Darwin, all the official correspondence on letterhead that bore the Leap-Backers’ symbol: a silhouetted man, tall, slump-shouldered, with a beard and a walking stick, one leg stuck out behind him impossibly. The Darwin Walking Backward, symbol of hope, stepping into the more innocent preindustrial past.
(Later, Mitchell would decide to keep the Darwin Walking Backward as the logo for the Reversalists’ movement by reversing its meaning, like an upside-down tarot card. He would take his father’s symbol of hope and make of it the opposite. It was a petty revenge, but it pleased him. He would make the Darwin a signifier of doom.)
Mitchell didn’t want his father’s metaphors. He wanted science. Yes, Mitchell had seen life on the mainland and hated it as much as his father had, but the hospital had saved him when the Leap-Backers refused to. The nurses had cared for him when his own mother fled. And despite having no education beyond what the commune had taught him, Mitchell, in his fervency of newly sober belief, saw himself as a man of science. He had got himself clean, after all. Clean from dope and clean from the lies the commune had fed him for years. So he would stay on the island, and he would bring others. Instead of his father’s farmers and peaceniks, let him bring science. Bring scientists.
His father was dead. Let him speak back to his dead father.
5
The Leap-Backers believed in Darwin the way people who have not read Darwin do, and they made of him what they would. They believed that the influences of the mainland, of 1968, were poisonous, and that humans were adapting into the wrong kind of creatures. They believed that living on the island, away from those influences, would allow their children to adapt into more natural beings. That they could restore human experience back to the good old days.
And what days were these? Anytime the Leap-Backers tried to pinpoint when things had started to go wrong and what time period it was they were wishing to return to, they were inconveniently faced with the past. And the past was ignorance and squalor, was oppression and slavery, was genocide and theft and war and struggles that made their own feel small. It was important not to be too specific, the Leap-Backers realized, and eventually “preindustrial days” became the consensus.
The Leap-Backers’ children knew only what they were told, and it was David Townes who told them about living according to the Darwin Walking Backward and how lucky they were that the island protected them from the evils of the mainland.
At night, these children, Mitchell among them, snuck out of their homes. They crept past the sleeping parents in shacks, past the ruins of the Lobby, where, in the kitchen, pots of rice were being cooked for the next day’s meals and everything smelled of grain broken open. The children snuck to the beach, where the water lapped gently, and they could see the shadowy bulk of the Landing, miles away, and wonder about the flickering lights on the other side.
One night: something new. An explosion of sound. One child screamed. Another peed himself. There were great bursts of shrieking fire in the sky. Twisting bands of light rocketing up, then fizzling. Purple trails popped and expanded into chrysanthemums and violet sparks showered the night. This happened again and again and from the far shore came the sounds of shouting and screaming.
It was just like David said would happen. The people who lived on the shore were destroying themselves. The smell of gunpowder and smoke that rolled over the water confirmed this for the children.
They were all dead, the people on the shore, and the children felt sorry for them.
They went home gravely, adult, knowing what they knew. The Leap-Backers, they were sure, were the only ones left, the true inheritors of the Earth.
The children slept well that night, snug against their fathers’ furred backs, their mothers’ warm and slumping breasts, which they butted their heads against for luxury and comfort. They were still alive and they were safe and they were lucky.
4
In 1963, Teddy Townes suffered a heart attack in the main lobby of Leap’s Retreat—Grand Hotel and Paradise Spa. The project was not anywhere near complete, but the lobby and facilities complex had been finished and several key investors and VIPs were there for an inaugural weekend stay.
Teddy wore a yellow tie, tight around his neck. His son David was beside him. Heir to Townes enterprises. Teddy had asked David to just please wear a suit and cut his hair. But here was David, hair to his shoulders, wearing some horrible patterned shirt.
The investors had spent their first day on the island drinking cocktails at the tiki bar and they were all now good and soused on Moscow Mules and Gin Rickeys. The investors’ wives had gone swimming in the heated indoor pool, a flock of pastel suits, paddling with their heads above the water so they would not muss their hair and makeup. They swam to the tiled edges, grabbing their husbands’ shiny shoes with damp hands, saying: Just come in, you won’t believe how warm it is.
In honor of the event, Teddy had imported a dozen bufflehead ducks, picked for the males’ beautiful feathers, and released them in the pool atrium. They clustered beneath ferns and a few swam in the turquoise water, the wives shrieking delightedly when the ducks paddled near them.
His guests were relaxed and as giddy as children. Teddy was delighted. His hotel wo
uld be a kind of paradise for those who could afford the luxury of forgetting the mainland.
And 1963 was a good year for forgetting. The guests of Leap’s Retreat swam and drank and willed themselves to forget the grassy knoll in Dallas, to forget the fire hoses in Birmingham, to forget the helicopters over Vietnam, to forget the tape over Cassius Clay’s mouth, and to forget forget forget Valentina Tereshkova, who got there first.
That night, Teddy led the guests in a toast: To the original guests of Leap’s Retreat—Grand Hotel and Paradise Spa! There was applause and a clinking of cocktails. It was perhaps because David was the only one unenthused by the toast that he was the first to notice that his father was red in the face, his eyes quite bulgy. Teddy buckled, and over the din of the cheering guests, David shouted for an ambulance even though they were on an island.
You’ll finish it, won’t you? his father gargled.
David did not finish it.
David put all construction work on hold and began camping in the Lobby amid the remnants of the party: spilled cocktails, paper drink parasols, a lost bathing suit, one of his father’s loafers.
This was David’s inheritance, but he did not want it. He lived in the Lobby for six months of grief and confusion as he watched his father’s work, so recently constructed, crumble and be reclaimed by the island.
And as it did, David found he felt better.
David soaked in the presidential suite’s enormous bathtub. He submerged himself and chain-smoked and studied the lichen spreading greenly across the wallpaper his father had imported from Japan, a pattern of ferns. Ants had the audacity to build great, tumbling heaps of homes inside the grand corridor. The cones reached high, two and three feet, red friends marching in and out of the entryways, conducting business, enterprise, progress.