Bunny and Shark

by Alisha Piercy

  Her. Banish that, Bunny, don’t think of Her, don’t formulate her face in your mind. You’ve never seen Her, but you’ve pictured Her endlessly and right now you can’t let yourself fall apart from the quivering, perfect form that becomes her image. Instead, let the abstract, acidic awareness of Her curdle upward inside you. Ask instead the question, the question that is uniquely about the two of you, you and the bastard, about your love and devotion: why, after all these years of knowing each others’ every move, why hasn’t he sensed you might have lived? That you do live. Why hasn’t he come back? Just to see?

  Night now, in a peculiar splendour of Speedo and tape, you jump over the edge of your sailboat with a loud splash.

  The water is dark and fresh, and the ribbons of tape descend with you in a shimmery flutter that rises again quickly and surrounds you. But the salt stings. Skin flaps up on several cuts freed from your twining efforts. You relish the smallness of those pains against the security of the other objects which stay put, as you start the generous pull of your strokes.

  Your plan, clear and simple: to swim from empty sailboat to empty sailboat, to spend as many nights as you need until the real plan of how to live again on your island presents itself to you. You are sure it will.

  The NAUI card: your weak link. You feel it scraping at your back now every time you move. Yet, you can’t tear it off. It’s the symbol you cannot let go of for fear that the bastard has already decided to erase every living trace of you.

  Can a person be entirely erased?

  The thief’s dilemma. Or the migrant’s. You have been a criminal, but you don’t deserve such definitive, all-out exile.

  And as you fall into a mute rhythm with the water, the only urgent goal is: swim as long as you can. The sea and salt will rub away who you are, leaving only the Bunny interior. That’s all that will matter.

  Scan the yellow lights each time you come up for air, and estimate the distances between the village lights and the shore lights, which are much closer, and then those of boats that spread out around you. But it’s the boats that hide out, those without lights, the invisible ones that you need to bump up against, to climb aboard and disappear into.

  Keep swimming. Feel as if by sonar: the circumference of the island, its salient boundaries: the tourist shores, the family-land beaches, the lowlands as they lead to the cliff where you got pushed. These are lesser known compared to the insides of the island, the hot, slick highways and main roads you’ve driven in your SAAB a hundred times over. The picture of yourself in your giant sunglasses, waving to acquaintances, is washed away, replaced by the image of your body become mammalian, shorn and buoyant, all pores reading every swish and shift of current.

  Then a light on your left and voices, and you slink down low in the water. You float closer. Several people are on the deck of a white boat, clinking glasses, eating from a tray that flashes silver and smells of rich, ornamental food. You bow as low as possible into the water and pull in to touch the hull of the boat. You tread so gently there to listen, for ages it seems, but you don’t hear a single word about you or your disappearance. Has the news not yet broke? Your shrivelled fingertips caress the fibreglass. Is that caviar? You are tempted to whisper to the man you sense is up there, just a few feet above you – Hey, I’m down here – and in your weakness, in that second, you imagine him hoisting your hefty body with all its baggy tape and Ziplocs up onto their pristine deck where you once belonged.

  Thinking something is bubbling beside you, you notice the pearls have escaped their bag, they unfurl at your side like a jellyfish arm ballooning into a sudden whiteness. Then they are gone. You don’t grab after them.

  Instead you drift away from the sounds of their champagne, and the beach behind you recedes even further. You go underwater and enter a kind of sea-quiet state that blots out your cold body and your two bloated raisin hands until you come up against a wall that is dark like an impenetrable sky: too black to make sense of. Disoriented, not until the surface of the boat is at your nose do you realize that this hard, flat expanse is not part of the dark sea, or dark sky, but of Coke-Bottle’s boat. And another party in full swing on deck.

  / / /

  On the water, sounds and space get all mixed up. Whispers that belong on one shore are turned to roars on an alien shore. In the late afternoon when the sun is at its zenith, sights appear across a span of water as if all has been turned upside down. Like the Fata Morgana mirages. You remember how this phenomenon once brought all the passengers onto the cruise ship’s penthouse decks (where you Playboyed it, dealing cards by night, and drinks by day). They’d raced to the prow, confusing the mirage with a sighting of land or a mountain that was just there, out on the horizon. They’d put their hands out to touch it. And marvelled for hours, while you pushed through them, shivering in your summer tux, carrying trays of Chardonnay and bottles of Crown Royal. Even then you’d never forget a face or a tab. Your brain kept everything tidy, catalogued.

  Now these sea anomalies count you among them, placing you at the vortex of a series of strange forces: distant voices sounding like they are right there beside you, dolphins emerging to save you. Your life becomes a mermaid’s.

  Stories of disappearances and balls of fire appearing in the night air conflate in your mind with the sudden appearance of Coke-Bottle’s vessel. It has always been parked not five metres from your own. Which means somehow you’ve been swimming for hours in circles, not towards the foreign vessels parked in the bayside, but blindly paddling back again to the sailboats of your gang. In this there seems to be order to the universe, even if mysterious, and you sigh with relief.

  Did your head make a thud against the hull? You aren’t sure. You will your dolphin-miracle to extend into the present: more and more, invisibility has become your armour. The gang must be too drunk to have seen you swimming along, and now you can silently ambush them. You bring yourself close to the descent of the black hull, cradling its curve, feel it sucking you under along its slippery surface. Coke-Bottle, right there out of uniform, holding a glass, telling a story to . . . Who is that? From this angle, you can’t tell. Goddammit if you’ll be caught out wearing this luggage and all shrunk up to look two decades older than you deserve! You’ve always lied so successfully about your age. No, this time you’ll hang back and observe them, see what they know.

  Out of habit, you run one bloated, piggy finger under each eye to wipe away smeared mascara. Then you remember you haven’t had makeup on in days. Jeez, they’d likely not even recognize you. Their drunken laughter infuriates you and fuels the growing temptation to pull yourself up onto their ladder and unveil your dead self to them. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past. The really fucking frightening one. And scream at them. The bastard would fall over dead. Oh, no question he is there. And even as you think this, you hear his throaty cough. The sound makes you instantly picture his bald spot showing when he throws his head over his knees in the glee of his own horsey laughter. Just days after having killed you, the über-bastard.

  Do you really have to hang tight? If you are dead then you should be able to do as you like. But the fucking trouble of it is your shivering, halted breath, your flesh getting heavier, a blank slab – all proof that you are in fact here, though thoroughly exhausted. The weakness of just barely hanging on. Unable to let yourself drift closer to their voices, to hold on to the ladder for a bit. To rest your head on a rung. You hear the din of men and women, their self-entitled fervour so familiar you can almost imagine their clothes, their hands chunky with rings holding the rails, their flirtations that can lead to blows that can lead to that kind of late-night brotherly love involving guns and hard drugs and someone peripheral getting eliminated. You chuckle silently at your exaggeration. It mostly is. Except when it happened that one time and you shut your mouth, for him, forever. It was part of your love-deal. The exquisite promise of it shivers through you, alerting you to your humanness and how this body was once cradled warmly in his arms. For a second you believ
e his love could be refreshed, that he might remember.

  Ready to give yourself up, ready to beg forgiveness and to be let back in . . . when a face appears, the black hole of a face draped by a falling blonde bob, so close you can smell the cloy of her perfume. It finds you and goes still. You will your ghostly shell to sink lower into the dark oil of the waters. She stays there wondering what to do because she is not seeing a stranger floating at the base of the ladder, she is seeing you.

  She knows you, your white putty face. Only a woman knows the face of another woman without her makeup. What follows is the frozen impasse of neither one of you knowing what to do next. Holding your breath, it’s like you are waiting for the high-pitched whistle to go off. But the hole, and what appears to you to be no more than a blonde wig floating against some celestial pattern of night sky, says nothing. Rather, you watch a red-tipped finger, attached to a disembodied white arm, point. The wig that turns away – you catch sight of its fullness, its lovely golden streaks, you recognize the stylist’s work, you know the salon – swooshes back at you again, so that you understand she has checked the deck to ensure her discovery is hers alone. Then the black hole is sliced through with that white finger aimed at her lips. “Ssssshhh,” you hear, ever so gently whispered. You glimpse the pursed red lips. Then as suddenly as she came, she is gone.

  Your hand slips. The bastard’s voice is booming in sync with several other voices, all responding to a splash not a metre from you.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?” yells the Italian. You turn your head away from him, trying to become the very shape of the underside of the boat itself. He calls out again and you sense people leaning over the edge to jeer at him. You make out the sharp scent of the perfumed woman. Is she blocking you from their view? You’re on the brink of identifying the exact label of the perfume when the swimmer calls out again. It’s not the bastard beside you in the water, or Coke-Bottle, but some other guest who now begins a hard swim, full of splashes, making his way back to the ladder. As his enormous hands grasp at the bottom rung, your hand falls away, as if two hands having nothing to do with one an other just miss a fateful meeting. Your hand goes slowly, so slowly, down, not to arouse any attention. You let all of yourself go under, gently fluttering your body away from the undercurrent made by the man who jumped. You pray he won’t retain some flash-memory of that hand.

  Moving away, raising your ear out of the water, you hear the jumper hauled back up, followed by a wet slap of approval on his back. You make your way around the boat to where fewer Christmas lights dangle away from the mast. The quieter side of the boat. And there is the parked dinghy, to hang on to. Just barely able to. To get up into unseen. You squeeze yourself into the square stern, folding yourself as best you can under the bench, pulling the tarp overtop of you with the very last of your energy. You sink into the pocket of warm air made by your breath. Eventually the soft sound of your breath fills the space and coils around your body in comforting wafts. You have never felt so chilled in the Caribbean. Or so trapped. Or so lost. Or so free.

  Day four dead

  (In which Bunny becomes a stow-

  away on a superyacht)

  HOURS LATER, when you’ve dried off and slept – it must be 4 a.m. – a couple stumbles into the dinghy. The man is singing absentmindedly. The boat goes topsy-turvy when he gets in, he is laughing, she is silent. Of course it’s her: the one. That perfume. The woman with the black hole for a face, who peered down at you, who decided it was okay for you to stay invisible. You don’t move despite her bottom’s weight pressing onto the bench where you huddle. Her navy-and-white leather pumps. You saw them a week ago, half-price at the plaza. At least she doesn’t shop in Miami. You feel a tenderness for these plump calves and swollen feet that bulge around the opening of the shoe.

  How this acquaintance, whose face you cannot place, might be your ally.

  “Jablonsky,” sings the man, “are you there? Not like you to be this qui-et.” He emphasizes each syllable, like he is seducing everything, the woman and the water. He ignores her when she doesn’t answer. He hums and continues to row against the light, dawn-coloured waves. “I suppose you’ll want to go back to the house now instead?” You sense that he is looking right at her. Which means, inadvertently, looking right at you.

  “The boat is fine,” she answers. You know her by her voice and her accent. She is the Frenchwoman with the Polish name who works real estate. More a friend to Coke-Bottle than a friend to you and the bastard. Nondescript and nice, a standoffish saleswoman who stood in stark contrast to the other island agents. Vultures, all of them, except maybe for her. You figured her to be independently wealthy, too refined for you and your gang. She wore understated, well-cut clothes, and yet never scoffed at all the bling and island flash. You had barely noticed her really, preferring the company of the gang of men who ruled this tiny empire of villas.

  Now you wish, more than anything, to reach out to her, to whisper to her that you are there. She’s on your side, not theirs. Instead, you let the boat rock you a little longer.

  / / /

  Their boat is a private cruise ship, a superyacht, run by a crew of eight. Two of the crew, appearing sleepy-eyed in white T-shirts, buff and twenty-something, usher in the dinghy and extend a hand to the shaky Jablonsky. Oh god, this is it. I have nothing to bribe them with once they pull back the tarp. You debate whether the NAUI card with your name on it is an asset or a liability. Will it be better to be known or unknown?

  Jablonsky stays put.

  “Leave me be for a moment, will you? I’m a little drunk still, not ready to come in.” She laughs a deep-throat kind of laugh that you would kill to have imitated in your Playboy days.

  What’s going on, Jablonsky? you ask without a word. Give me a sign. What am I supposed to do here? And you listen to Jablonsky in the delightful process of smoking a cigarette at dawn. You imagine her running through private thoughts about what she saw that night as she quietly peered over the sailboat edge, having no idea that now she is partially crushing you, her stowaway. She kicks the tarp out of her way when she’s done smoking, sending its hard edges ruffling up against your skin. You almost grab her leg, you feel violent towards her now. We had a deal babe! But as she steps out of the boat with ease, you realize the deal was all in your head, and you’re back to square one, and the deck boys will be coming any minute to pull this vessel into the tender launch: the foldaway garage of this small ship.

  You shimmy yourself out, making way too much noise. Then you stand, shaking all over, and sit back down on the bench. Then stand again and fall over, and catch yourself as the boat tips and you throw your leg back to the other side to make things even again, just in time. If you can hide out here you’ll have access to food, clothes, a phone. Just make your stiff body do what it’s told. Pull on the rope to draw your dinghy in to the side of the cruiser.

  On board the sleek white lower deck you experience the familiarity of luxury. You let yourself fall into the hard, plastic angles, a kind of scramble and clutch that places you firmly on board. You face the bristling white emery surface, the ship’s jaw edge. You exhale and moan. And feel your cheek flab press deeply into the grains, like you’d give up your entire weight into this one cheek if you could just stay there and get discovered. Be served a filet mignon with a side of blue cheese and be put to bed by the stewardess. But you are running now, stepping up onto the main deck and moving along the narrow ledge past the design-improved porthole windows of the crew rooms. They could be anywhere, this crew. You want to get gorgeous again, before anything else. It might happen with Jablonsky and her king.

  You feel shifts underfoot from plastic decking to plush, brown carpeting. The expanse of the main deck lays itself out before you: multiple rooms joined by loft-style partitions, mirrors of all sizes speckled with gold, decorative cabinetry of dark wood. A bachelor’s den at sea. Mirrors and screens reflect the spaces in confusing ways – advantageously, you see right away, as there will be many
places to hide. This becomes immediately necessary as you hear voices coming from a joining room, a bathroom. The husband enters, wearing a robe, Jablonsky next, wearing nothing. You see her from the back. You tuck yourself into a closet to watch them through the crack. You slide yourself down on the carpet. You can smell yourself against this tobacco-on-new-car smell: you have serious anxiety B.O. and the kind of bad breath that comes from not having eaten in awhile.

  They are getting ready to spend the day in bed.

  The maid arrives with a tray full of food: carved fruits, eggs, and toast with melted butter on top. Starving, you almost declare yourself as they settle under their feather duvets, clean and fresh. They eat, and smoke cigarettes at the same time. The husband flicks on the TV. You hear a sports announcer and smell the pineapple juice that drips down Jablonsky’s face and onto the bed. Her tapered fingers hold everything so precariously that it falls out of her hands. You merge with her as she sighs deeply, satisfied, breathing in time with her until she coughs, looks at her breasts, then brushes the crumbs from them daintily onto the ground. Soon after, they both fall asleep. You stand up, look both ways from the closet and walk soundlessly over to the bed, stub out husband’s cigarette and turn the TV up a few notches louder. You down a glass of juice, followed by all the coffee, gathering as much pineapple and toast as you can and shuffle back into the closet. You regret having to listen to the game while you eat. You wonder if they’d notice if you went back for a cigarette and smoked it through the crack. You are in a good mood, feeling like some good can come of this now that you’ve been fed.

  / / /

  Jablonsky and her husband sleep all day, as do you, seated upright in their closet with your bum squished into their shoes. When you look through the crack, you see the food tray has been taken away from the side of their bed and been replaced by a new one full of stainless-steel covered plates. The TV has gone silent. The whole place is hushed and you sense it is evening. Urgency now, to get out of here before they wake, to find a bathroom and clean up. You move your body to a hovering position and push the door against the plush carpet. Then stand there ridiculous and uncertain for a moment, shuffling stiff-limbed here and there around the partitions, trying to decide which way to go. Your tapes trail, they are covered in fuzz and feathers from a stole or costume of Jablonsky’s, it all hisses behind you, your NAUI card slapping at your spine as you find the stairs.