“There is a place I like to go,” I hear myself say. “To fall silent.”
As I describe the deadspot to him, he listens in perfect stillness. Even his blinking slows. Several times, I hear him swallowing his coughs. It feels like a betrayal to entrust my secret to this man, when I’ve told none of my sisters. But almost anything I say to them provokes a terrible reverb. Whereas the stranger is an open field—no buried stalagmites, no love lost between us, no history, and no expectation of a future. These turn out to be the perfect acoustics for confessing a secret on which I do not actually wish to reflect.
“And you don’t think the pollution is damaging you?” he asks at last.
Deranging you, I hear.
“No.” The skin under my breasts begins to burn. “Not really.”
An odd rash has spread silently over my belly, unnoticed by anyone. Even I forget it’s there during the daylight hours. My hands remember it, at night.
“You choose to swim here,” he says. “In the world’s most toxic waters.”
“It hasn’t affected us.”
“Hasn’t it, little bat? It’s affecting all of us.”
He drums his knuckles on his temple, his smile softening like something boiling at the bottom of a pot. His voice curls inward, so that it seems he is talking mostly to himself.
“The gondoliers. The birds of Chernobyl.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing. A bad joke.”
Algae drags behind us like an old-fashioned wedding train. You have to sweep the lantern over it to arouse the red glow; the unlit bay is entirely black now. Soon I will deposit this person on the seawall, I think with relief. Then I will go night swimming. I imagine the water closing over my head, swallowing me into it. The feeling that this water is gestating me, my secret life. So secret that for whole minutes I know nothing about it.
We drift while I rest my voice. Very gingerly, the man lowers his left arm into the algae. Then he drops his soaking hand into his lap, where it looks like a netted white fish. I watch him frowning down at the hand, as if waiting for it to change before his eyes.
“Tell me something,” he asks. “Why do you keep returning to this deadspot?”
For some reason, I feel myself blushing. “I’m the youngest in our family. My sister Vi was like a mother to me. At the hour of my death, I’ll still be the baby sister to them. It doesn’t seem like I can age out of the role…”
This is certainly part of why I feel entitled to my lonely hours in the deadspot, I explain to the man. Their entire life before my birth is a secret from me. Whereas everything I’ve ever done has been visible to them.
“Out here, I float into my own element. When I am silent, when I am alone, I feel free. I don’t have to sing along with anybody. Even my thoughts stop.”
Under the water. Far from my sisters. Outside the chaos of our breaths. Only then, when I am nothing to anyone, do I feel the great peace.
It’s as if I’ve released something living into the narrow gondola. I picture the secret floating between our faces, a jellyfish emitting its soft violet light, blowing open and shut. I wait for the man to turn it into a joke or to shame me for coming here alone.
“Yes,” he says quietly. “That’s it exactly. What a discovery.”
The man lifts his eyes to mine with naked surprise, and I feel equally astonished. The longer we stare at each other, the louder a pure tone grows inside the gondola. Audible, I think, to both of us. He pushes back the green hood, smoothing the wet leaves of his hair. Gray or brown, there’s no telling in this lighting. His wide smile sends all his wrinkles into hiding.
“Who doesn’t dream of it? The silence that blots up thought. The silence that frees one from the burden of being oneself.”
This smile is like a portal back to the stranger’s childhood. Every prior grin I’ve seen tonight, I realize, was a counterfeit of this one. Understanding someone can make you feel understood in turn, and I smile back at him, to let him know that we have this thirst in common. It occurs to me that I should thank this white-faced man, the marine engineer, along with everyone from the last century who heard the water coming and failed to stop it. The deadspot is their creation.
* * *
We gondoliers operate by the Golden Rule. You do not take any risk you wouldn’t want your sister to take. You don’t pole into bad weather or shoot the tunnels at low tide. You refuse any passenger who might overpower you. I would kill my sisters, for example, if they risked their lives to take a fare to Bahía Rosa.
My sisters and I all pretend to live by this code. To prize safety over profit. But I have always felt quietly certain that perfect adherence to the Golden Rule would sink our business. We’d never leave the hangar. When I started breaking this rule routinely, it was easy enough to rationalize. I needed a darkness that would have killed the others, and they needed me to keep it a secret from them. This did not feel treacherous, not at first. It felt like a loving choice.
People will tell you that Bahía Rosa is a fatal place, but for months it was my paradise. The black-walled horizons. The silence that let me ripple out of my body, until at last I felt entirely at peace, whole and unfractured. One with the wildest turnings of the universe.
But at the same time I had begun to wonder, poling home from the deadspot, How true can this sensation of unity really be if you need to leave everyone you care about to get it?
* * *
We float over a school of pompano, dozens of frozen gray faces skipping in front of the bow light. Something has frightened them; I glimpse a long body saucering beneath the transom. The man beckons me down from my platform. When he asks his question, his words quiver like the fishes.
“Do you and your sisters ever hear the voices of the drowned, in this bay?”
“No, sir. That’s not…we don’t have that kind of range.”
“I see.” He nods, but I don’t think he believes me.
The man helps me by bailing water, leaning carefully forward. His green slicker bunches around the stringy muscles of his shoulders. The humming grows inside me until there is no room for worry. What will it feel like, I wonder, to enter the deadspot with another person? To fall silent with him? He thinks my home is a cemetery, and I want him to hear how wrong he is before we part company. The end of his life is not the end of all life. Something wants to be born.
* * *
We pass the line of black buoys. They strain after us on their long tethers, like dogs sniffing at the gondola; just as quickly, they are lost to sight. Their nodding heads push against the back of my mind as I sing.
OoOoOoO…
OoOoOoOo…
For a long time we see nothing at all, only water and more water. But I reassure the man that I can hear the seawall drawing nearer with each boomeranging note of my song. And then we both see it, the bleached wall, looming like a motionless wave on the dark horizon.
I touch my tongue to the inside of my cheek. For hours I’ve been waiting for this moment, but now that the end is in sight, I don’t see how I’m going to manage the pivot. It’s impossible to imagine leaving this sick man alone on the seawall with no supplies, no fresh water. Tantamount to pushing him off a roof, on a night like this. The nausea I felt back at the jetty returns with a force that nearly doubles me over.
We shadow the soft shoulders of the tree islands, where I hear the curly voices of laughing-yellow, snarling-green vegetation. In twenty minutes, I tell the man, we will reach the former land-side edge of his wall.
But when we are perhaps three hundred yards to the northwest of the seawall’s rocky edge, the rain begins to fall in earnest. It pounds into my skull, drawing a caul around the gondola. More water splits the sky; in an instant, the map inside me dissolves. If I were home right now, I’d be listening to this storm drumming
on the metal roof. Luna would be snoring above me, Mila below me. I’d be drifting off myself under the blankets, at the beginning of a dream. Can my sisters still hear me? I hear nothing but rain. I swing my light across the chop and feel the stirrings of real panic. By sight alone, in such a punishing crosswind, there is no way I can make this passage.
“Violaaaa?”
“Milaaaaa?”
“Lunaaaaaa?”
My voice flies off and does not return. Nothing answers me. Nothing steers me here. I place the pole in its mount and climb down from the platform. Perhaps my poker face is not on straight, because the man gives me a wild look and grabs my wrist.
“Why aren’t you singing?”
“Forgive me, sir,” I say, avoiding his eyes. “I made a mistake. I thought we could beat this storm. But I’m losing my voice. I can’t map the channel. If I miscalculate the passage, we’ll capsize.”
On a slack tide, I explain to him, I’d shortcut across the bay, but the water is alive with eddies, and I don’t want to get smashed against the wall or sucked out to the Gulf.
“Girl,” he says slowly. “Take me to the goddamn wall.”
His voice shakes with a rage I could not have predicted even a heartbeat earlier.
“I can see it. We could swim there, practically—”
“No. We can’t risk it.” His face is almost unrecognizable to me, winched tight with anger. “I won’t risk it,” I clarify, because it’s suddenly clear to me that he is making very different calculations.
“You won’t risk it. You’ll bathe in poison, but this is too dangerous?”
The man tugs me toward him, shouting over the wind.
“Tonight is the anniversary of the storm surge. Do they teach that history in your floating schools?”
I had forgotten the date; it isn’t one we celebrate. The night the pumping systems failed. The night the seawall was breached by the towering water. The wailing night that did not kill our mother, who would live for another seven years so that I could be born.
He tightens his grip on my wrist, gazing at the spot beyond the bow light where the angled rain is steadily visible. Horror seeps into me; his or my own, I am no longer certain. Large chunks of darkness lift and fall around my gondola.
“I traveled a thousand miles to die here. I chose this spot, this date. I wanted to walk across my wall on my last night on Earth. That was my wish. To die at home, on the anniversary of my children’s deaths.”
Beneath the sagging hood, he peers up at my face. Here is a man who has written the last scene of his life, I realize, who is furious that his stage directions are getting eaten by the wind. His voice lowers, and inside of the anger I can hear a grinding disappointment.
“Don’t hold out on me, miss. It’s cruel to stop here, within sight of our destination. I didn’t come this close to the end to turn around.”
Our destination. Rain pounds into the hull, water we should be bailing. His feet are bare, I notice—at some point, he must have removed his boots. The toes waggle up at me, as if their good humor is still intact, even as the rest of him seems bent on destroying us.
“When the rain stops, I’m turning around.” I let out a shaky breath. “I cannot, in good conscience, take you to your death.”
“But, miss!” He laughs angrily, reaching a wet palm to my cheek. “You already have. Look around you. We’ve arrived.” The scolding note reenters his voice. “Now, be honest. You knew where you were taking me. The deadspot, you called it.” Raindrops go jumping off the green slicker, outlining him in fizzing silver. “Get your pole. Finish the job I hired you to do.”
“No.” I climb back onto the platform and begin to turn us toward the lee side of the nearest tree island, which I can just make out through the rain. When I look again, the man is standing in the stern. We ride up one swell and down into a deep trough, and I have time to feel amazed that we did not capsize just before the man lunges at me. He must be a better echolocator than I am: when my arms lift, his arms shadow them, a rhyming motion. Quite easily, he wrestles the pole away from me. He gives me a terrible grin, gripping my pole to his chest. Sisters, I was wrong about my last fare. He is stronger than I am, and he is so much sicker than I imagined.
“Since you refuse to continue, I’m taking command of this vessel…”
Warm liquid seeps through my trousers and I am crying now, I want to go home. OoOoOoOo, I scream. The man releases my arm. For a moment, his eyes shine with some trace of our earlier understanding.
“Poor little bat. You just wanted to disappear for a little while, didn’t you? You don’t actually want to die.”
I don’t. I don’t, but I had to come a great distance to learn that, Sisters.
“You should stop swimming out here, then.” Again I hear the scolding note, but it’s much fainter now. He is trying, clumsily, to push off the rocky bottom and turn the gondola toward the seawall. I watch him struggling with the push-pole, its foot now choked with mud. “This whole bay is a stomachful of bile.”
Then comes a rippling instant where the scene I am imagining becomes the action I am taking. I watch my hands reach out to grab the pole back, my fingers closing just above his knuckles; he doesn’t let go but twists around with a cry. I crawl forward and bite at his hands, missing but causing him to howl. He is still clutching my pole when a strong wave washes over the stern, unbalancing us both; I let go to brace myself, and the man falls backward into the rainy water.
I scream with him as he falls, and I go on screaming after he splashes into the bay. But I don’t jump into the churning water after him, terrified that he will drag me down. I don’t reach my pole out to him, because I don’t have a pole now; it went overboard with the stranger. I croak at the water: “Sir?” My voice is almost gone. It occurs to me that I don’t even know what name to call. It’s so dark that I can’t see where the man surfaces, but I hear his arms crashing heavily through the algal mats. He is swimming away from me, I realize with relief. He is trying to make the wall. If I were to swivel the lantern, perhaps I would find him bobbing mere feet from the boat: his pale face staring up at me, wreathed in glowing algae. Perhaps I could save him. Save him, I command myself. But I don’t move from the floor of the gondola. Instead I cover my light, and I wish only for the slapping sounds to stop.
Eventually, my wish is granted: the splashing ceases. Either the man has drowned, or he’s swum out of earshot. The new silence is soaked through with his absence. I lie flat on the wet boards, pushing my fists against my stomach. My pole, I imagine, must be riding these same waves into the Gulf or sinking to some depth I cannot hear. And my passenger? He is a true missing person now, I think. A special amphibian. Dead and alive, to anyone who knows him. The last splash he made is a sound that will not leave me. You killed him, I try not to think. The moon shines into my eyes; very slowly it occurs to me that the rain has stopped. I have a peculiar, nerveless awareness of the water’s trembling surface. Where am I? My mind is like the sky between the stars, void of shapes names facts. But I don’t need to sing to guess.
IV. THE CHORUS
I stare up at a busy construction pit. Tiny white spades are tossing huge quantities of darkness around. Stars—these are the stars.
I’m not sure how long I drift like this, trying not to think about the terrible splashing. Without my pole, I’m in bad trouble, but I screamed for so long that I must have blasted all feeling from my body, and it hardly seems to matter that no boats will find me in this distant bay. My bow light plucks at the stringy algae. Perhaps I sailed right through a break in the seawall without realizing it. My song is a pitiful hissing, and it returns no depths or distances to me. When I hear a woman’s voice rising out of the darkness, I think it must be my imagination. My light swings in the direction of the singing.
A gondola is arrowing toward me, flat-bottomed
and opal white in the powerful beam of my lantern. My good feeling immediately flips into horror. A gondolier stands on the poling platform, her hair blowing loose. The pitch of her singing rises. God, please, no. God, please, keep us separate. No, no, no. I am not ready to meet her. OoOoOoO, she sings at me. Can this be possible—am I about to run into my doppelgänger? My double, poling out of the past or the future? Perhaps the man will be seated in her bow, smiling out of his green slicker. Will he be dead, I wonder, or alive?
But it’s not my double that draws into view; it’s my sister.
Viola glides silently past me, wearing a blindfold with trailing ribbons, her slack face illuminated by the gray orb of her bow light. Her droning song floods into me. I hear the same sound that pours from my throat in the deadspot—an emptying hiss, like grain spilling from a sack.
Her gondola moves much faster than my mind does. Lethargic thoughts chase each other in slow, widening circles: She’s come out here to find me. She’s put herself in terrible danger, all to find me.
But soon I realize that Vi has no idea that I’m near her. The blindfold is a trick of last resort; tight pressure across the temples can sometimes help us to hear better in bad weather. It doesn’t seem to be working. Her hair flies raggedly out behind her. Her singing has the strange, flayed quality of all sounds in the deadspot, shadowless and flat. Now I hear, with excruciating clarity, how much trouble we’re in for. Vi didn’t come out here to save me. She’s lost herself.
“Vi!” I scream. Too hoarse, I’m sure, to be heard.
But Viola unties the red bandage around her eyes, using the blindfold to wipe at her face. Had all the drowned risen up to address me tonight, I could not have been more astonished. Shaking her hair out, she turns and looks right at me: “Blister!”
Orange World and Other Stories Page 19