Island

by Johanna Skibsrud

  But then she lowered her voice again and narrowed her eyes so that they almost seemed to cross.

  At the embassy, she warned, they were under no condition to shoot. “Not unless the entire operation is threatened, do you hear?” She paused. “And of course by ‘entire operation’ I do not mean you. You,” Kurtz continued (but her voice was softer now, perhaps even a little bit sad), “are just a tiny drop of water, do you understand? A grain of sand. A single—already extinguished—star. Is that” (there was another weighty pause) “perfectly clear?”

  “Yes,” Lota had chanted—her voice responding before her mind had even properly made sense of what had been said. Around her, from every side: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  So, it didn’t matter that they didn’t understand. The word itself was enough. It filled the gaps, propelled them forward…

  Later, Lota would puzzle Kurtz’s meaning out at the fish plant, or in the few moments she was granted alone at night before being pulled—almost against her will—into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  Most of the time, she did end up feeling that she had come to some sort of understanding in the end. But sometimes she didn’t. Try as she might, for example, she never could understand how any whole could be made up of parts that, on their own, more or less virtually did not exist at all.

  It didn’t matter. She got too caught up in the details. Verbal was always telling her so.

  “Yes,” something in Lota responded again now, just as Kurtz reached the embassy door. “Yes.” As the door opened. As, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alien begin his approach.

  It was happening.

  Yes.

  Here. Now. Lota’s heart thudded powerfully.

  Yes.

  And she—no matter how invisibly—was a part of it. She shut her eyes, practised the visualization exercise Kurtz had taught them. They had to not just be able to see it happening, Kurtz said. They had to feel it—somewhere deep inside them, in the blood, at the level of the DNA: the Army’s unconditional and absolute victory over the acting government of the island.

  Over and over again, they’d practised, together. Each of them with their eyes shut tight around the boardroom table, Kurtz at the helm. Her hair erect—framing her head like a halo. Her calm, steady voice leading them slowly, step by step, through the events of the day.

  The exercise would always conclude the same way. “We,” Kurtz would declare, “the people of this island” (here she would take a brief, sharp breath, pulling the air around them taut like a bow), “answer to no authority but our own.”

  There would be nothing but silence then, until, inevitably, the world began to return, very slowly. In the form of the buzz of the air conditioning, or the whine of a chair under someone’s shifting weight.

  Lota always fought it. She tried desperately to remain with the voice, with the events as they’d been, and continued to be, imagined, but she always found herself drifting. She’d feel an itch at the back of her throat, or else an image of her mother would flash, or the voices of one of her brothers would echo suddenly in her mind. Or else she’d start to picture herself explaining all about it afterward, about how everything had happened, her own part in it all. Or it would be Verbal. She’d feel his eyes on her with the sixth sense for that sort of thing she’d developed lately. It was as if they were connected by an invisible cord. Whenever he nodded, or shifted in his seat, she could almost feel it snap.

  Alien now; it was nearly time. Lota watched him. Strolling along the outer path, dressed in a collared T-shirt, slacks. His weapon was concealed; his posture—like Kurtz’s—unworried, nonchalant.

  It was just so different, though, Lota thought—watching it happen in real life. There was too much detail, even for her. Now, for example, as Alien approached the embassy’s door, she noticed the little cracks on the concrete, heard the hum of the sprinkler on the lawn, felt her own pulse in her throat and neck. She felt so overwhelmed by these excess details, which she’d so thoroughly failed to anticipate, that she could no longer recall—let alone visualize—what was supposed to come next. The future, she realized with a quick flutter of panic, was utterly, terribly blank.

  She shook her head to clear it. She needed to focus—that was all. What did the cracks in the concrete or her own pulse have to do with anything?

  Once the door shut behind Alien…

  Three minutes. Okay. The images came flooding back to her; she shouldn’t let herself get so distracted; shouldn’t allow herself to begin to doubt. Three minutes now.

  She looked around quickly. Bruno in the front seat; Baby Jane behind. Hannibal, then Verbal directly to her left. No one in the van looked as casual or as nonchalant as Kurtz or Alien had. Maybe it was just a matter of proximity. In the van, they were all practically sitting on top of one another: she could see the perspiration standing on Bruno’s forehead, hear Baby Jane’s breath quickening, feel the way the blood was beginning to constrict inside Verbal’s veins.

  It had become almost unbearably hot, and it was as if all the air in the van was being slowly pressed out from the inside. No one looked at anyone else. All eyes were on the clock on the dash.

  Two minutes.

  Lota wiped her hands on her jeans. She hoped they wouldn’t feel too slippery on her gun. She took a deep breath and tried to locate that place inside her where the thing was already done. She felt distracted, though, by the heat, then by the sound of the sprinklers, which continued to hiss outside on the lawn.

  She glanced across the street. Watched a few kids, playing hooky, pass a single cigarette between them in front of a vacant building with the initials JPF scrawled in brilliant blue letters on the side.

  Then, as though there’d been no progression at all: “Let’s move.”

  The van door clicked and slid open. The hot air hit Lota like a wall. A moment before it had been too warm inside the van; only now did she realize how comparatively cool it had been.

  Hannibal, closest to the door, leapt out. He was wearing khakis and a military beret his great-uncle had worn fighting for the Empire in the Second World War. His feet hit the gravel and he took off at a trot. Behind him, Joker. Then Norma, then Verbal. Now it was Lota’s turn. She could hear Baby Jane and Alex DeLarge begin scrambling out behind.

  No one looked back. They trained their gaze on the back of the person directly in front of them and made sure they maintained a distance of approximately five yards.

  Lota stared at Verbal’s back. Sweat had darkened his shirt in a V-shaped stain. She was careful to keep pace, so that the distance between herself and the stain neither lengthened nor shortened.

  Then Hannibal gave a shout and the pace quickened. She was through the embassy gate (five steps), had moved along the path (fifteen), up the wide concrete stairs (four more)—

  But now she lost track.

  Verbal was still in front of her. All right. She could still see the stain. But she could no longer calculate the distance between them—and then she no longer had any bearings at all. There was just a sudden rush of motion, a blur of colours, of bodies and sound as she moved toward—then through—the open doors. A surge of blood to her brain—then a feeling of intense relief. It was as if her skull had opened and every thought she’d had leading up to that moment, every doubt and misgiving, every selfish apprehension had been suddenly released. The cool air of the lobby blew through her emptied brain. Her veins opened like corridors, delivering oxygen to parts of her body that had never received oxygen before.

  She made her way as if by instinct across the lobby toward the stairs. She didn’t need any bearings now but her own. She climbed. Taking the stairs two at a time. She turned left —automatically—on the third-floor landing. No, she needed no direction now…How many countless hours had she spent, after all, studying floor plans, visualizing their approach? She knew the place like the inside of her own brain. She’d practically created it—dreamed it up. The spinning fans overhead. The double glass windows at the top of the stairs.
It was all hers—yes. And because of it, she could feel rather than see her destination at the end of the hall. She moved toward it instinctually—like a plant toward the sun, or a tree root toward water.

  But she hadn’t managed much more than four or five paces before her movement was checked. She doubled over—thought, at first, that she’d been hit by a physical blow. It was only after she’d raised herself again that she realized it hadn’t been a blow but a sound: a gun had been fired.

  Then two more shots rang out. This time Lota understood what they were and kept her balance. At the end of the hall the door to the minister’s office was ajar. Just a moment ago, she’d been heading straight for it without even really seeing it there, but now she saw it plain as day. The rigid rectangular frame, the slant of light on the floor, and Verbal—feet spread, the top of his shirt still dampened by a V-shaped stain—standing squarely in the entrance, blocking the way.

  Verbal.

  Relative distances re-established themselves. Her arms shot out—a reflexive gesture. Almost immediately, she retracted them.

  A darker stain had begun to spread its way across his shirt in the opposite direction. As Lota watched, the two stains—one spreading from above and the other seeping up from below —began to take on the shape of an hourglass. Lota swallowed hard. She could not make sense of the way that the two V’s ran together, the darker stain on the bottom spreading more rapidly now.

  She swallowed again and looked past the stain, toward the minister, slumped at his desk. If it were not for the blood, which was beginning, with a steady rhythm, to drip from the table onto the floor, Lota might have assumed that he was simply absorbed in a difficult task.

  But there was blood—and Lota recognized it. When she looked back at Verbal, she saw that the stain spreading on the bottom half of his shirt was also blood. She continued to stare. First at the hourglass and then at the minister and then back again at the hourglass. She felt the direction she needed to move in somewhere deep in her body, but something else—some immense pressure—held her.

  The first secretary’s office was just next door. Lota blinked hard, twice, in an attempt to make the hourglass and everything that went with it disappear. Then—by tremendous effort—she turned and plunged the few steps down the hall.

  At first, the room didn’t appear to be occupied. Lota looked around, but there was nothing to fix upon. Her vision wobbled. She turned—was just about to go. But then a sound startled her; a shrill, almost inhuman cry. Her vision sharpened. A tall, thin woman holding a phone to her ear came suddenly into view. She was wedged like a stick of furniture between the desk and a filing cabinet and didn’t appear to be speaking to anyone.

  Slowly, very slowly, Lota raised her gun.

  The woman’s chest heaved. There was another high, strangled sound. Lota’s hand on her gun was surprisingly steady. She pointed it at the top button of the woman’s blouse. It was not a steady target.

  “Shut up! Put the phone down!”

  The two women stared at one another.

  Finally, the telephone clattered to the floor.

  “Hands up.” Lota’s voice felt closer this time—more under her control. The woman must have sensed it, too. Almost immediately, her hands shot up.

  Lota grabbed at one of them—keeping her right hand steady on her gun. Then she lowered her gun hand and unclipped a set of handcuffs from her belt. It was all much clumsier than she would have liked but at last she managed to secure the woman’s wrists to the desk’s upper drawer. The woman was forced to crouch awkwardly. She stared up at Lota from that position. Her mouth moved; it’s possible she spoke.

  A wave of nausea hit Lota. She levelled her gun. It was a relief just to see the expression on the woman’s face change.

  Another wave. Lota turned and ran; she didn’t care where now and it seemed almost by accident that she wound up facing the minister’s door.

  But there was Verbal.

  Lota’s stomach lurched. So she hadn’t dreamed it. He was slumped forward, against a chair—directly opposite the dead man. In the time she’d been gone the hourglass had spread itself and darkened; it now covered almost the entirety of his lower back.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Verbal didn’t respond.

  “What happened?” Lota leaned in, pressing her hands against Verbal’s shoulders. He collapsed heavily against her, and—though she tried to steady him—in another moment his weight propelled them both to the floor.

  When Lota got up again, she saw that the front of her shirt was covered with blood. She touched the blood with the fingers of one hand, then looked at them. Verbal looked at them, too. They sat there for a moment, looking at the blood on her hand.

  “He—he had a gun,” Verbal said. “And…and you.” It was painful to look at him. “You,” he said, “you were coming in behind.”

  Lota grabbed his shoulders again. Shook him. “So?” she screamed. “So what?”

  “He had a gun,” Verbal repeated. “I didn’t want…”

  Lota sobbed. She shook Verbal’s shoulders, but more gently now. “So what? So what?” she cried. But by now only the light parts of Verbal’s eyes were visible. They were nothing but surfaces—practically opaque. Lota scrambled to her feet; her legs felt like someone else’s beneath her.

  “I’ll get help,” she said. She moved toward the door, which was still half-open. She walked through it. There was nothing to stop her.

  For the first time, she became aware of how quiet everything had become. She heard a few scattered shouts, the screeching somewhere of shoes on tile, but it all seemed to be coming from very far away, as if it had happened a long time ago.

  She thought of her grandfather, who’d been a cableman. Of the stories he told: how you could sometimes hear voices, how the ghosts of old messages, long sent, still sometimes whispered through the wires.

  Lota shook her head and tried to think. She glanced down at her watch but didn’t fully register the time.

  In any case, it was clear from the relative quiet that the guards had been disarmed, the hostages secured. Kurtz would be down in the lobby, waiting.

  For her. For Verbal.

  Lota needed to reach Kurtz. To tell her…

  She hesitated. Tell her what? What, Lota wondered, her throat constricting and her mouth going suddenly dry, would she, could she, possibly say?

  She felt for her phone in her pocket. She should have it out by now—should have already pressed Dial. Yes, in another version of this story (a version she knew better than this one, because—unlike what was happening now—it had happened so many times before), she’d already put in the call. Norm had already picked up the phone at the depot: “Everything’s been secured,” she’d already said. “Move out.”

  Again, Lota glanced down at her watch. Again, she failed to register the time.

  She began to move, unsteadily, down the stairs. It was difficult going. Like plodding through waist-high water.

  Just as she’d anticipated, Kurtz was waiting—her face tense, but absolutely blank. She was not looking at Lota, exactly, but past her—at the staircase Lota was descending, the exact point where the steps disappeared, spiralling toward the upper floors.

  Lota opened her mouth to speak. She pulled the phone from her pocket and extended it toward Kurtz. She didn’t know what to do with it now and didn’t want it in her hand.

  Kurtz only continued to look past Lota toward the point where the steps gave way, revealing their overall structure.

  Norma was there and, for once, her eyes were visible. She, too, was looking at Lota strangely—an odd little grin beginning at the corners of her lips. Bruno opened the front door slightly. Light streamed suddenly in.

  Confused, Lota closed her mouth. They don’t know, she thought. She’d simply assumed…with the shots, the commotion, the long delay…

  She looked down. Saw Verbal’s blood on her shirt, her hand.

  It didn’t make sense. They had to know. Ther
e could be no mistake…And yet still Kurtz had said nothing. Still Bruno had opened the embassy door and let the light stream in.

  “Verbal—” Lota managed. But Kurtz had already stepped forward. She raised her hand in front of her face, as if to protect herself from a physical blow.

  So, it was understood after all; she would not be required to explain. Still holding the phone out toward Kurtz, she descended the last few steps in silence.

  “Everything secure?” Kurtz said. She enunciated each syllable unnaturally.

  Lota looked from Kurtz to Bruno, then—propelled by something outside of herself—she retracted the phone, pressed Dial.

  “Hello? Hello?” Norm’s voice erupted loudly. “What the hell’s happening down there?”

  Bruno was still holding the door open, letting in the heat and the light from the street.

  “Hello! Goddammit, hello!” Norm was shouting. Lota looked at Kurtz again. For a brief but extraordinary moment, she thought she saw a flicker of something like doubt cross her face.

  “Hello, Norm, yes,” Lota said. “Everything’s secure.”

  Kurtz turned. If she had cast a spell, it broke. Lota dropped the phone into her pocket. Bruno tossed his head, then lunged through the open door. He advanced down the path, toward the van. Kurtz followed. Then Hannibal, Joker, Norma, Alex DeLarge, and Baby Jane.

  Finally Lota. She exited slowly, then practically ran down the path. The sun felt good on her skin. Purifying. For a second, she actually thought that everything was—or would be—all right. For a second, she thought they could begin again from the beginning. Pick up the dream where it had been disrupted by the first shot; reverse the direction of the hourglass stain that had spread its way both up and down the length of Verbal’s back.

  As she approached the van, she saw that a small crowd had formed on the street. They shouted at one another, or stood silent, or whispered together in little groups.