I fork through my meat and turn it over. What else? I suppose you’ve seen a lot of water, I say, you’ve probably surfed in a lot of incredible places.
He says, Yes. He brightens. Lots. And most of them look like this one, he says. He names an archipelago or two of even more far-flung islands, says the sharks are bad on some of them, but then, they glow in the dark, why worry?
He stops because his food is almost gone, because I’m staring at him, because he should. He laughs. Glow in the dark, he repeats, shaking his head at his own joke.
What if I don’t test out?
Well, they’ll give you a few more tests, and maybe some treatment. It’s not that you want to be in any hurry not to take the tests. But don’t worry, you were hardly exposed at all. Not like them. He points the chewed end of his red meat to where they sit as if they are already dead, not eating.
Where do you put the trash? I ask.
He points to a hole next to the serving area. I push in all of the brightly colored foods so they tumble into the dark that trash makes, and Ngarima comes up to me.
Don’t sleep, she says. Ghosts will get you when you sleep. She looks as if she has locked her eyes again, the way you do on the island to sleep in the day.
Stars in absolute excess, I gulp stars in my breathlessness, swinging through the last door off the stairs that finally lead up and out, and she is sitting on the cold metal deck, her legs drawn up, her eyes on the smoke that curls but does not drift into the stillness of the star-packed air. She is a civilian now, or at least the lab coat’s gone, her clipboard’s stowed—nothing she holds protects her. She jerks her cup back toward her toes, away from me.
Not that I threaten her, not that I come toe to toe. I am bathing in stars. We sit in absolute dark here, an aurora borealis in reverse, black paint sucking the stars closer than even the stars on the island, which will surely someday set fire to the tops of the palms, fronds waving once too often against their white light.
’Tis the season. She offers me a shot, which I take. And I take a second one, and one more before she says it’s not her bottle.
As many islands as there are stars, I say, toasting her. You like working for this corporation?
She levers herself up from the deck, weaving a little, smoothing her way forward with her feet. They give you a house at the facility, it’s okay, she says. It’s a very modern place.
It must be hard. I stand too.
A lot of medicine is hard. I try not to think about it.
I’m good at that.
We talk, and the dark starts to spin with words, which I try to hold on to. I ask what I need to ask, Are you the one in charge?
No.
Okay. So who is in charge? I ask.
She leans on the railing, leans as if this is why they’re installed, not to keep people in but to let them lean. Below, she signals with a hand off that railing. He hardly ever comes up, not even at night. He could be in Bellevue instead of the ocean, he could be in Persia, he’s a thousand-and-one-nights kind of guy. He’s the one.
She’s maybe more drunk than I am.
It was an accident, you know, she says.
I know what an accident is, I say.
The captain will like my story about the island, I say. In my story, children hide under it as if it were just a spoon to be overturned. But instead of being served up in a mouthful, they come up through the sand as jelly.
I stop, I go on. The important part of the story is why they are hiding.
They should hide, she says at last.
No—not children, they shouldn’t, I say. What have they done?
Her smoke triples in the wait.
It’s nice you don’t lock us up, I say.
She dumps ash onto the deck. You’re guests, you’re volunteers.
Can I change my mind?
She stubs out her smoke. I say before she can answer—because yes or no isn’t relevant, because it isn’t my mind I want to change—See which way the palms grow on that island? Have you ever actually looked at this island?
She glances over. The island’s backlit by stars. Left, she says, they grow left.
Trade winds, I say. They never blow any other way. Now, if it were all an accident, this Bravo thing, which is what the husband of the woman you have here who is screaming so much calls what happened, if it were all a big accident, if it were just a big mistake that they made, letting the cloud spew itself up, up, up and be borne by the wind, wouldn’t you have to know which way it would go? Wouldn’t you have looked at the palms at least? See that speck a hundred miles away, you said, that’s nothing, there’s just people in the way. Or maybe, Let the wind blow a little that way and then we can see what’s what with a few people. Even the gravestones blew that way.
Okay, okay, she says. I didn’t do it.
Did I? I ask. Before she can suck in another star off the deck or drink from her cup again, I try another voice: “Studies show that in paradise, sex is paramount, that the natives reproduce like rats”—do you hear a voice like that rising in wonder, envy, lust, do you hear it tinged with the amoral curiosity of science, some boy-scientist speaking who tears the wings off six generations of flies to see if it affects their reproductive abilities, their, you know, sex?
Our parents elected those people, I say, and we keep them in place.
She has already walked away.
The stars are still there. Hot little islands.
I stroll past a card game. The little girl from the island squats beside it. I sit down and take her on my lap, though she resists, she tries to squirm away from me in fear because I have never held her or any of them, never comforted their boo-boos or said sorry. At least she knows who I am, I am not the drinking woman. But of course I have no Band-Aid for her, no Band-Aid with some animal on it that children like printed on the side that’s not sticky, I don’t even have words she’d like to hear, home or get well, so there we struggle.
I let her go. I leave the stars for the stairs, for the very bottom of the stairs, where the doors are hot with engines behind them. Some are open, so I don’t have to knock, I don’t have to call out over the machines, O Captain! My Captain!
Of course, he could be sleeping. It is night, and on a boat any time is all the time, they have watches and they take turns and surely even captains sleep.
Nothing promises anything inside room after room: the machines and their couplings fill them almost to the ceiling the way plants do, a thick blooming, but one room does divide and through that burrowing division must lie its reason.
He smokes and wears a tiny hat. It’s the kind you wear for building expressways or putting I-beams into buildings, but it’s the wrong size, the size real estate salesmen wear when they’re saying it’s in move-in condition, the one that sits on the head and teeters. Despite the hat, he’s in charge, he’s no missionary-in-a-helmet. He doesn’t bother to look up when I enter his high-tech lamp light, not even when I cast a shadow in his smoke.
He could be blind.
He is not blind enough to wear the glasses they wear because he turns to me when I say, Captain, and he blinks pale eyes, I see them see me.
Doctor, he says.
Excuse me, doctor, I say. Of course he’s a doctor. That makes me fear him more, but I cast off that fear for later, when I have more time, when I don’t have someone looking at me or three shots of liquor inside. I want to go back, I say.
He spreads a chart over his knees, and it caves in the middle where the blue is, where it’s lined with circles inside circles inside circles. He stares at the map—to sort out the creases from the bull’s-eye?
You’re sicker than you think you are. But don’t worry, honey, he says without looking at me. Haven’t lost a patient yet. He snaps the chart taut and picks up another.
None of them? I ask.
You can think what you want, honey. He smiles at me, a dazzling smile, one with teeth, then he opens his new map, snaps that map shut. We have all the data.
He folds the map small.
One more thing, I say. Can I bum a few cigarettes from you?
He chuckles with an addict’s pity and hands over what’s left of his pack.
Part 4
He bolts the door behind me. I walk away slowly. He’s called for security—You like security, right?—to help me find my way back. I’m to stay right there.
I start to walk away quickly. I start to climb fast, then faster when I hear someone on the stairs. It, It, is what I hear in my head, I am It. I run all the way to the rail.
It is time to choose.
A good thing it is night. By day I would think it all out, lay each piece face up and add them. At night I can’t separate fear from fear. Besides, I am frightened by heights, I fear putting my head down and seeing whatever’s so far down, and I can’t see much but stars in this night. I still have what I drank as a comfort when I duck my head way down so when I jump it is not from a height but through all these stars.
I fall the way my son fell.
But into water.
I go so far down it feels as if I’m being pulled under by some deep-sea creature to make sure I never breathe air again. I fight my way up, and all that fight surprises me, maybe I wanted to just stay under, but I don’t, I’m star-side again and swimming. I don’t think about the sharks I disturb, the ones cruising the ship for its rain of leftovers, I gasp at the top, not thinking.
Someone rimmed by the light of the stars has heard me hit the water—she has, it could be her.
I gasp again, trying to be quiet. I’m now full of fear and now off the boat, and now what? I’m on the dark side, at least, where the moon isn’t. I’m not going to swim back to the island, I can’t get back on the boat. I swim over and touch the boat as if it’s base.
On the island, the islanders are practicing their dancing. I hear the clipped orders, the drums building, the tune about holiday stars that Ngarima sang on the beach with her Jesus. Does anyone hear me? Above, people collect and lean over. No, nobody, is what they say about my splash. But someone else—the woman, no doubt—says, Yes, with such assurance that they go to find lights. That’s what they shout out to get.
What rocks in my darkness? I paddle-crawl through the dark to find the lighter, the outboard end. I pull myself onto it, but I am used to someone pulling me in, and it takes me three tries plus my leg thrown over to get on.
By now lights make a plaid of the water, and I hear footsteps click on the ladder above the lighter. I turn the key that’s there and ready, I throttle and pull.
Boat driving is easy if you can see where you are going, if you can at least see the gears. Otherwise you bang the boat in reverse, you almost de-leg the man who is making his way clown to you, but all of a sudden all the light that is now on you lets you see and you go, jerking, off into the night.
You can’t get through the reef in the dark, but it’s not so dark anymore with all this light, all the light they need to launch another boat after yours, anyway I don’t think about what I can’t do, with the lighter moving so well beneath me and turning when I turn. So when the white-headed surf rears up, I find my way, I don’t think of myself and the boat mangled and turned on its sharpness—I just go.
Not that I make it. The boat flips in the surf, and I capsize fast, foam and coral and some very hard wood hit me as the boat goes down. I’m senseless in a light-dark-light moment, the foam and dark sprayed into the spotlights the boat casts out for me. But when I surface, all banged up, I’ve been shot on a wave into the utter dark past the reef.
How can I swim? It’s nothing. I do it with my legs and arms, I flail like that small-headed boy in the lagoon. When I find I can’t breathe I hope to touch that soft monster sponge, but of course I don’t. Did I imagine it anyway? I don’t know what I do but splash and gurgle in a direction that might be forward—there—is that dark part land? Is that tin basin reflecting their light, or is it the moon? A streak of light bounces with drumming far away.
Pain comes so suddenly to my leg that it doubles me up. It must be a nail from a wreck, but next there’s an electric jab into my foot so bad that I can’t straighten it out, I am gone with pain, so far beyond the banging up I’ve just had on the reef that I take on water.
A wave, a lucky wave, tears me out of it, goes the right way, the way I think of as right where I come from, where I must go back to, a kind of amniotic wave, a slap-on-the-bottom wake-up wave that makes you cry out, outraged, and live.
You think we didn’t notice the ship all lit up and the sirens going? Harry hovers over me. A boat with horns like Jehovah blowing?
I move my head as if I might laugh with him, but no, it is impossible to laugh, I can’t laugh, I can’t even move my mouth very well.
Barclay saw you. What does he have to do now but walk the shore all night and wait?
What? What? I say. This is all I can say, and point at my feet, which are bandaged and itchy and hot.
You should be dead, says Harry. Or at least gone, with them, rescued as it were. What happened to you was you hit a taramea, a fish so poisonous we had to use gloves to pull the spines out.
A poison fish? I say, pulling hard at my mouth muscles to get to the p.
Harry sits on a mat beside me. I see it is his mat.
I saved you from them later, says Veelu, who leans into my vision with Milo in a half coconut.
I sip.
Show her how, says Harry. This is the saving after the fish, when they came to the island to get you back—you, their prize experiment. They swarmed the place, I thought the island would sink under their weight—or that they’d find me and take me instead.
Why didn’t they? I try to say.
Veelu lifts her arms, removes a pin from her hair on top, and shakes her head. Veelu’s large hair, so mane-wild and black-silked, falls off and down her back, and her own hair, the little she grows, stands in surprised wisps in small clumps over a head scarred in parallel rows. You like it? I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair, she sings. And send him on his way.
She waves the wig. They give this to my sister in a box, and it is all she has to send me. When the ship people see me without it, when they see the scars the boat has left me with, they don’t bother me. You stay here too long, I say, and they’ll do it to you too. They believe me when I say you are in the surf, finished.
He and Veelu laugh, and it’s strange and painful for me to hear how they do it together, how he then touches her baldness with his thumb, showing that they know they look the same.
I don’t know why they didn’t take me, says Harry. He is quiet with old fear. He restacks the pink shells around the edge of the room. But they didn’t come back, he says. Did you want to be gotten?
I am crying. The tears fill my ears and make me feel underwater again, but they are tears of relief, tears that have waited for a right time to be shed. I am not dead, I work out of my mouth.
I can smile.
I am asleep. I am not asleep. The green outside the window turns blue under my lids—or is it water coming through my head, fixing things? I am listening to the swish of palms and hurting. That’s all you do when you’re ill, listen and hurt, back and forth, a conversation as deep and dark as that. Sometimes a thought buzzes between them, but it can’t connect to anything, can’t feed off the listen or the hurt, and so it drops.
What drops? I am alone here in my sleep. I’m not at the guesthouse, I’m back on my rice bed in the house of silence—Barclay’s empty house. Barclay haunts the shore, watches for what won’t come in or float up, Temu making o’s in the water in front, in back of him.
But now something drops. Somewhere in my listening—it’s a place, my listening, in my recovery—the house is vacant for me because who else will go into it, with its windmilling ghost, its lost boys and lost mother?
I am asleep, so what drops is a dove from a dream of what happened, a dove that came in a box on the Paradise shoot. Gulls were too vulturish to fly across the palms that we
re supposed to sway in a breeze from the dawn, so we had doves sent in boxes, small gray boxes, coffins, some said. When the sun finally moved out of a cloud that was supposed to be dawn’s but was dusk by the time we shot, we scooped those doves out of their boxes and threw them up toward the sun.
They all dropped to the ground.
Since I am asleep, I can open my eyes.
The room is as dark as sleep. It is night. I had forgotten that, or I didn’t know. When is it not night in my sleep? I could raise my hand to my eyes to see with my hand if my eyes are seeing, but my hand hurts and itches. I am too sleepy to make it rise, too tired of hurt.
The dark breathes. I breathe and it breathes. I stop and it breathes.
I could cry out. Over the pounding ocean? Over the dark, deep night in which no one else is crying? Ghost. It would be ghost, their tupaka. If only Barclay lay nearby, with his night noise, astraddle Ngarima with her bulk like a boat he would take out.
Or if there were just a lamp that could break.
I can see shape now. Large against what there is of a moon, the shape stands by the curtain, and its flowers quiver a little—from his entrance? From a breeze?
It is no dream, I decide. If he has not come to press himself into me, he comes to kill me, he comes to turn the pillow over on my face—or empty the rice into my nose and mouth. Because I am the one Veelu said, a Bravo person. I did it. My deciding can’t stop, I hear the breathing, and I think, think, think.
I sit up. Get out of here, I shout. But what I say comes out small.
He walks into some light. Before I see him, I know. The way he walks is why I didn’t wake before. I know the way he walks. It was just that dropping I didn’t know.
Barclay, I say. You scared me.
A Drink Called Paradise Page 9