Bunny and Shark

by Alisha Piercy

  Coke-Bottle’s car drives away as you make your way down the beach road. The lobster-seller doesn’t miss a beat of his hum-song, but raises an eyebrow. The hot skin of your feet on asphalt is electric, transporting you, inch by inch, back towards the water, where you were delivered. A miracle, the dolphins, no question. Sustain this, please. You can’t handle the real of this yet. The let-down of walking on the ground, the dead-heavy slowness of it. The dolphins made a cradle for you, just go back there to them, to where you’re protected. You deserve to be protected, you were born to that.

  The smell of takeout goes by, something fried, devoured, discarded, a crumple in your ear. Girls in gold earrings as large as baskets hang around, their laughter mixing with the smell of the food you couldn’t buy if you wanted to. Reaching the end of the road, you glance towards a garbage bag that looks just put out. Beside it, a pair of shoes. They are the hearty, lace-up leather kind worn by older live-in maids. The shoes fit you perfectly.

  Light-headed when you lift yourself up from the street after putting them on, you think: now I can at least walk somewhere. But you’re not sure where to go without any money. You don’t even have a purse to carry so that it looks like you have money.

  You reach the end of another small road, one leading to the beach by the bay. All locals here. You’ll only be able to stay by night in these parts. Tonight you’ll sleep tucked up next to the abandoned house. First you walk your new shoes right over the steep ledge of sand and sit down there to listen. Not so far out from the shore you see a number of anchored sailboats: Coke-Bottle’s sleek black vessel, the Italian’s blue, the bastard’s newly painted red and white. Your eye is now all closed up and quiet and you stare for a long time at those haunted emblems of the men who will continue to sit at your dinner table. Until your one good eye becomes exhausted, loses focus, and with it the facts of the boats and the reality of the distances that surround you. You see your own boat shape-shift against the strain on your good eye, it becomes a blob, then a sea creature, so you close your eyes to think of what’s inside. Make the tour of the sailboat.

  Last time you were there it was dawn. You left in the dinghy, left the bastard sprawled out in his bed, the sheets and his drunk flesh pouring into the small cabin. All drunk and dressed up. But now it is empty. In blackness you roam the cabin. You can feel yourself right there, opening the cupboards and cracking a bottle of fizzy water. Your narrow bed with the silk sheets and your clothes stuffed in the drawers. Your magazines and your watch in the cubby by the bed. It would be so easy to swim out there and sleep in your bed and put on your watch. Can you steal the time back again for good?

  Fuck these shoes, fuck invisible. Fuck these shoes. You kick them off and head straight for the shoes you now see before you, your own expensive sandals in the closet of the cabin next to the fire extinguisher. You’re still an excellent swimmer even if you are getting old. You find you are running, the water isn’t even cold or threatening, it is a pathway back; it will only take you half an hour to get there if you swim fast.

  / / /

  As you swim, the pulse of the dolphin’s strange skin stays with you, like body recall that lasts long after the lover is gone. You feel sure that the dolphin embedded its soundless whine in you and that now you too are a reader of the dark channels. Your body has vibrational power, it sends ciphers out behind each kick as if to say, Here I come. No fear of sharks or jellies – you’ll sense them if they’re near – nor of the airless darkness. Yes, in the water you are lightness itself, your fat flies off you, drifts away behind you, makes you lithe and sleek and fast. Queen of the breaststroke, you drop deeper underwater and you feel your old power come back. Warm and confident, you continue making wide arcs in front of you, leaving a solid wake behind you. You have a destination. A plan.

  To forget the land. And the palms and the Precinct and the friends’ villas you’d had visions of sneaking into. It is the sailboats that are sanctuaries. Their locks are feeble and, anyhow, you know where the spare keys are. You can picture them hanging from a tiny plastic buoy hidden behind the wooden shutters of the cabin doors or lying at the base of a heavy coil of rope.

  The sea goes suddenly cold. Salt shores up and flocks densely around you, blindly magnetized to your skin. Because you are not the sea. You are blaring and human and soluble. You swallow a mouthful of the saltwater to feel the purity of its threat: how it is capable of dissolving your organs, then your bones, then lastly, your skin. From the inside out you will be nullified. You will become a suspension.

  Liquid dust, you are nothing without him. You say his name out loud. Instead of saying “the bastard” you say his real name. Then you say it again, wanting to exorcise yourself of him, but the effect is opposite. His name overwhelms and belittles you. You cry out an embarrassed, stilted sound, barely any voice left. There is a shuttling wall of fire welling up in you, running slow and liquid, starting at your heart and spreading outwards. You push against it. The onslaught is almost peaceful. The enormity of murder being so straightforward.

  Fucking bastard: the shark pit was a joke. Your joke even; you told the bastard and the others about it, that ten to twelve sharks slummed regularly at the foot of the Lowlands cliff. But it was a myth. So how was it that the bastard made a real shark appear?

  You sob, right there in the middle of the sea. Your arms get drained of all their power, they hang disembodied at your sides. You have to stop, turn onto your back. Float. Your miracle and your plans evaporate: he betrayed you. He cut you out.

  Tread water, keep afloat, breathe hard. Breathe so the red-and-white boat looming out in front of you comes to within an arm’s reach.

  The ladder is down. You bring yourself close to it and put your foot on the slippery step, feeling the hard tug of the ocean as you pull yourself up. You take your clothes off immediately, balling them up and pitching them overboard. Naked and dripping you watch them sink. But do they? You don’t stick around to find out. Check later, you think. Your footprints will be dry soon. You’ll leave no traces. Trust he won’t remember what was there and what wasn’t. You’ll eat sparingly.

  You take the key from the hiding place and open the lock without having to force it. As you crouch down the narrow stairs into the low cabin compartment, the smell of your own perfume hits you hard, as does your sudden sense of house-possession. The familiarity and comfort of it all and how it’s all still your world. The bastard’s bed, everything as you pictured it to be: bottles and glasses spread out over the cabin, your watch, exactly where you remembered it to be, the food you’d thought of still there on the shelves. You take the food, fall into your bed, and eat it, doing everything all at the same time, making crumbs, putting on your watch, wanting to do everything, to have everything, to be everything this represents.

  Jumping up again. Stopping yourself from cleaning up, but doing it mentally. Then stopping that impulse. You must memorize the arrangement of everything and not touch too much. Can fingerprints be dated? Will he expect to find that rotting tray of hors d’oeuvres next time he comes, or can you throw it away? It smells. Stop it. Let it reek.

  “Rot on him,” you say, food falling out of your mouth.

  Curl your body up into your sheets away from the filth and into the darkness. You breathe in the smell of yourself. So pungent and new. Still you. Just deeper somehow.

  / / /

  By morning, it rains. Without thinking of anything, certainly not danger, you stretch out your arms behind your head and glance down to your thighs. A thing you do every morning with mild disgust and no definite plans to do anything about it. Then the usual thoughts of coffee and breakfast and cigarettes. Jesus, you say, through a cough and a laugh, your hands scramble around the cubbies by your bed. Where are your cigarettes? While your hands search, a hint of fear passes into your heart. Your hands continue searching while you look out your porthole window, scanning for something coming your way. Nothing: only more and more ocean water in one direction, and across the way, thr
ough the other porthole: the shore, houses, people as specks starting to fill up the beach. You pull your sheets up around you as you spot a pack of cigarillos under the bastard’s bed. You make the effort to reach for them and light up with the bastard’s gold lighter.

  “The pit was a myth and somehow a real shark appeared to eat me all up. You piece of shit,” you say, smoking. “You retarded piece of shit, feeding me to a myth,” you say, getting louder, until you find you are raving and ashing all over the cabin, not caring about the glasses you smash on purpose, overturning the objects not nailed down to the floor. You run over to the bastard’s bed, and rip the sheets off and rub the stub of cigar and all the ash and peels into his pillow.

  “You piece of betraying fuck!” And you march naked and sweaty over to the fridge and take out all the food: bright pink pâté, a sausage peeled back from its white covering, murky pickles, and make a pile on the bastard’s bed where you eat it like you’re actually a sow, or some kind of animal ripping the food apart with your chipped nails, letting it all smear across your face and drip onto your exposed rolls. You make stains on the sheets. You indulge in rubbing it in.

  Eat until you think you must be full. Though you don’t feel it, your raw, empty heart racing is the only sensation. Brushing yourself off, you go up on deck, smoking another cigarette to have a proper look at who or what might be looking for you.

  Day two dead

  (In which rain rises up from the ocean and

  washes the rage away.)

  COCKSURE, RADIATING FILTH. Tobacco on your nostril out-breaths. After a flash rainfall, as you lie on the deck with eyes closed, heat bears down on you through a crack in the clouds. You stay that way, leaned up against the front cabin window where you’d always sit with your 11 a.m. cocktail, and you revel in the post-tantrum energy. Of it being over now. The familiar aftermath qualities of thrill: of having won the argument and wrecked the house. Smashing expensive things just makes the point that everything is worthless to you anyway. Replaceable. Exchangeable. Except you won’t let yourself be: you’ll remake, reframe, get back to your beautiful self. Polish, style, adorn. Pull out your reliable charms.

  In time, you smell smeared pâté cooking on your skin. It dawns on you, and you smile: the sun is sending you a message. You bake, you swell. You imagine this sun pouring life into you. How it is meant just for you. How it is telling you: you don’t need to be dead. That you were subject to a miracle. Of always having received.

  You picture the heel of your stiletto pushing the accelerator of your SAAB as you speed past the black boys on bikes to get to the Plaza Cavalia, the plaza at the centre of town, so much shinier than the real one in Italy. Then you picture the wad of clothes you arrived in slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean. They hit the plankton soundlessly. You run your hands over your sweating naked body. It’s on the fat side, sure, but your Bunny is still there pushing through the surface. Look how strong you are, how you swam all the way here. Look how your boobs are holding up. You don’t look, you don’t need to; you’ve memorized them from every angle in your bendy mirror room. Dammit if you don’t see that Italian bedroom set again. No. Stop that Bunny. Make it new. Here you are, on the deck of your own sailboat, getting an all-over tan, pointing your breasts as close to the sun as possible. Hours like that, soaking in pretentious thoughts to keep other thoughts out, until the sky is nothing but a pane of glory pouring more and more of the island’s richness onto you.

  Anything, everything is still possible.

  Then a second short rainfall breaks your tanning session and dampens your crystal message. Maybe you should hide out a little longer, find out what the bastard knows so far and what his next move might be. Figure out how to work your way back into the circle slowly. Do you come back entirely as yourself, or reinvented? Undecided, you do nothing much all day. You go back inside, tiptoe through the shards of glass, and plunk yourself back into the bastard’s bed, in front of the TV with a bag of chips. From time to time you scan the cabin and notice you’ve done little more than piled new chaos onto the old. It is totally unrecognizable. You fall asleep feeling dolphin-worthy, safe at sea, voluptuous and exhausted.

  Day three dead

  (In which Her drifts away on a ribbon of

  Scotch tape and Bunny makes a plan.)

  DRUGGED HAZE UPON WAKING. You wade through it. First the sluggish smell of fish as they meander through the shallow waters, then this unsteady view of the horizon going up and down through a crack of door. Finally the memory that, in the night, you got hold of the bastard’s sleeping pills.

  The sailboat bobs softly in the water and you bring yourself onto your knees, fumbling as best you can through the broken glass and blankets that clutter the two beds; you rush from one side to the other looking through the portholes to search for someone searching for you. Could he already be inside? You jump to your feet to lock the door, and careen, off-balance. You smell the sharpness of cheap plastic having been snapped. Your body heaves like a stump of wood or something oversized that is at odds with the economical shapes and angles of the cabin space, and your numb limbs become some thick, dumb island that thuds to the floor. Your dolphin-Bunny power narrows itself to a shard, like the chip of glass you come eye to eye with as you lie there, the room now spinning out of sync with the dip and rise of the boat. You feel ill. You puke. And the reality of the stifling cabin, with all its new putrid smells of rot and smash-up, makes way for a fresh wave of paranoia.

  Sticky and bloodied, prepared for deception, you stand, only to grab at furniture that rolls away on creaking metal wheels. The sea might be a trap, you think. There are so many ways the bastard could surround you. You think of how the food will run out. How flimsy the locks are. How they’d burn down your boat before you could lock them out.

  Being burnt alive. Smashed to death against the cliff rocks. Devoured by sharks. Why glorify yourself when you know full well that if they find you now they’ll simply shoot you dead?

  Your brief handhold on a cabinet ledge sends your hip pivoting into an invisible, painful corner of something you miss seeing. Thankfully, somehow, you coincide with the bed, which you fall headlong into. You lie there breathing. You feel your blood soaking into the sheets. Rest now, and heal, Bunny. Nothing suspicious has been seen or heard today. “Pills, wear off, please, oh please,” you implore to yourself. What you need are ointments, some fizzy drink, and a clear head to think this through with.

  But you sleep again. From some other lifetime you are sent a sensation. You dream: of weapons that are dusty, dripping red. There are horses. Your soldiers following earshot away. There is fierce inhuman growling. The sound of galloping, yes, you are riding through a northern climate at dawn. So far from the ocean. Your ride is on land, the hard, frosted kind with trees as bare and grey as your hands gripping the coarse mane as you move at ruinous speed. A battle scream breaks the still air. Axes fall thudding to ground. A woman, not you, cuts a line in front of you, she runs across the icy landscape in bare feet, in a white dress covered in a cross of blood. You know you have murdered her, that you can do it, that you did do it, that you are capable and ready for anything bloodthirsty raw.

  Jeez, what kind of pagan shit was that? You sit up and feel clear. Your eye, an exploded range of yellows and deep blues, with an etched black opening that inspects your face with measured care, concludes the cuts aren’t that bad at all. Compared to your dream, at least. You dab at them with outdated Polysporin.

  In a drawer under the bed, your hand pushes past a sequined T-shirt and a tangle of pearls to find a one-piece Speedo bathing suit. You squeeze into it, stretching the elastic with your rolls. It’s something you’ve never worn but have had in there forever. Once a bikini-only lady, how easily you stuff your mouth now, cramming in whatever food is at hand. You Band-Aid your cuts, then wind them and the rest of yourself in a sterile, waterproof tape, smoking a cigarette all the while. You put the pack with the lighter into a Ziploc bag, which you also tape to your
back, crisscrossing your chest over and over, turning your body into one big holster to which you add Ziplocs of a small bottle of water, the pearls (why not?), some cash, and the only personal ID you find on-board: your NAUI Diver’s Certification card. You can’t quite rid yourself of this final proof that you are you. You giggle at the thought of yourself in that bikini you tossed aside, with your hair in its characteristic giant blonde poof hovering over your melon-perfect tits. All tied up now, you raise your arms up and down, stretch from side to side to test how well you stay in place, how those selfsame tits hold firm, feeling satisfied that nothing rips. You leap thunderously onto the step to avoid broken glass, then go up on deck and take one last look at the cabin disaster. Will the bastard connect this mess with you or his own debauchery?

  You decide: he’ll connect it to you. You who are supposed to be dead and mangled by sharks. Fucking bastard. So you go back down, pull on a pair of his cowboy boots and sweep all the glass and medical garbage and crumbs and change the sheets, and then stand back to survey the twin beds glowing in their satiny gold like two bar tops. His eyes will gravitate towards that tidiness, and remember. So you rip the covers off to look at the effect. Too much of a prison-scene fuck-you absence. He’ll know. You remember that your bed was made, and his wasn’t, so you redo the gold and tuck it all in, look one very last time and decide on a dozen other small shifts, this way and that, before everything looks just like any other drunken night spent on board by the bastard alone. Or with her.