Isabelle the Navigator

by Luke Davies

  ‘I’m out of the cottage before he starts beating me. What I mean is, I go to a different part of the dream. And now I’m so sad, it’s almost unbearable. I’ve never felt this sad in all my life—I mean me, Laura, not whoever I am in the dream. It’s like I’m two people. I’m walking across these fields towards these dark cliffs. There’s nobody around. As I come closer I can hear the noise of the waves on the rocks getting louder and louder. Some other things become apparent to me. My name is Kathleen. My hair is being blown about me by the wind. Then I’m at the edge of the cliff. I feel this sadness like a tiredness that goes down to my toes.

  ‘Now it’s really terrifying, being in this trance but half-aware, not able to leave it, knowing there’s something to be solved, a question I want answered. And then I realise I’m here to commit suicide. And I’m looking down at the rocks and suddenly my despair is so great that I am no longer scared. I am resigned to the fact that I’m about to jump down to the rocks so far below. They’re jagged and black.

  ‘And then I’m aware of this…this…presence beside me. It’s like a glowing of white light. Okay. It’s a person there. It’s a new person in my trance, in my dream. I try to turn to see what he looks like, but I can’t really turn and he remains like a shimmer. And then I’m filled with this beautiful light, which is obviously a part of the light beside me, and in an instant my sadness becomes a joy that even today is impossible to describe. My name is Kathleen, I’m twenty-two years old, and I’ve led a miserable life. Here I am on this bleak cliff and I am about to die, to escape from everything. And this presence is beside me, and then it’s inside me, and I feel a love I’ve never felt before. Oh God, it’s so pure, this feeling.’

  ‘Is it Daniel?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s Daniel. At this point I ask myself the question, and the answer is obvious—I know it sounds crazy, but this is the boy in the cafe in New Orleans, without any doubt. But why can’t I see him? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not like he’s real, like my husband or my father— I mean Kathleen’s husband or father. I can’t see him. It’s really just the feeling of him that’s there.

  ‘So I don’t jump off the cliff. I walk back to my life, across the fields, down the hills, to my village. I know I’m in Donegal, on the north-west coast of Ireland. I don’t know how much my life has changed but I know that I feel different. I know from the glow that I’m all right now, that I’ll survive. Somehow I’m protected and safe, even if things are bad.

  ‘Now Laura wants to know more. Who is Daniel? Where did he come from? What was he doing on that cliff? So I try to move around in the trance again. It seems so easy. I just tell myself, go where it is necessary to find more information. And I’m there. Do you think this is stupid?’

  ‘No, no,’ I half-lie. ‘Go on. I want to hear more.’

  ‘It’s a bit further in the future now. Not too far. A year maybe. It hasn’t been good, living with my mad husband. But every time there’s violence, I can draw on my memory of that white light on the cliff. And be safe. It’s a cold cloudy day and I’m way up in the back field digging potatoes. I just can’t tell you how vivid this all is. I’m on the bunk in New Orleans but I can smell those potatoes and that soil, you know? I can feel the weight of that potato in my hand and I can see my hand drop it into the sack that’s tied around my waist. And from far across the fields, from the other side of the small harbour, I can hear the church bells begin to peal. It’s the way sound comes to you on the wind, from far away. You can barely hear it, but it’s there.

  ‘I stand up straight and listen to the bells. It’s not Sunday. There’s only one explanation. Fishermen have drowned. The bodies have been found. And I know that my husband is dead. And I’m happy—really happy, for the first time since the light by the cliff. No, I’m more than happy. I feel all my heaviness float away from my body, up into the clouds. I know I’m going to go through the motions of the mourning widow, but the truth is, I’m joyful. My husband is dead. I’m twenty-three years old. Life can begin.

  ‘There was one more move in the trance. It’s a couple of years further on. It’s the day of my wedding. My second wedding. I can feel the excitement. There’s a lot of activity in the house of my beloved. Little girls everywhere, soon to be my nieces. My husband-to-be is a fisherman, too, a captain, a handsome man, older but calm, a man with a generous spirit. I know all this just from being in the trance. The trance tells me we’ll have children and we’ll live together until old age and not be unhappy.

  ‘For a moment I’m alone in the room where I’m preparing myself for the wedding. And in that moment, suddenly, there is Daniel beside me again. The shimmering light spreads out from where he stands. It fills the room. It is a moment of closeness, intense beyond imagining. I’m so happy. But I’m sad, too. He is going away now, and I know we will never meet again, that the white light will go forever and leave nothing but the traces of its warmth.’

  Laura rolls over onto her side on the huge hotel bed, to get more comfortable.

  ‘Phew, long story. Are you still with me?’

  ‘I’m with you,’ I say, my head resting on the crook of my elbow, staring at Laura’s lips and eyes as the story spills out.

  ‘At last, I come out of the trance. Out of the state. We’re back in New Orleans now, okay? I look at the clock on the cabin wall. Two hours have passed. I’m exhausted. My body is tingling and light. I’ve just had a supernatural experience, the first one in my life. I’m twenty-six years old and I laugh: I figure if I was that way inclined, I would have known about it by now! And the dream, or whatever it was, has told me a lot of things. But it didn’t tell me one big thing: who the fuck was Daniel? All I know is that the boy in the cafe who I’m seeing on Friday and the glowing light in the dream are the same person.

  ‘It makes no sense. I think it’s meaningless, I think it’s crazy, I kind of ignore it. I try to ignore it. But it’s so strong. I have a logical mind. I’m proud of that, right? I’ve never even thought about this weird kind of nonsense. I tell myself, okay. Laura. This is nothing. This is perfectly all right. Perfectly normal. This is what your imagination has invented, to come up with an explanation for your reaction to Daniel, for your feelings about him. It’s a bizarre explanation, but that’s your imagination and you can be proud of it.

  And I say to myself, no matter what, do not tell him about this on Friday. It’s just too bizarre. If you tell him this story he will listen politely and then he’ll excuse himself and go to the bathroom and find a window to climb through and get out of there as fast as possible without even paying for his drink. He will never even say goodbye.

  ‘So Friday comes. We meet in a bar at the pre-arranged time. I was pretty good with men, always knew what I was doing. But I was nervous in this situation. It was the power of it, you know. I didn’t feel in control. And a gay man, too. And it wasn’t directly sexual—though we did end up making love twice, a couple of years later, but that’s another story.

  ‘We meet. We order drinks. And then, guess what? Maybe it’s to break the tension—I blurt the story out. I can’t believe I’m doing it, but once I’ve started I don’t seem to be able to stop. The crazy story is pouring out and inside my head I’m saying to myself, here’s the end of a beautiful friendship, before it even starts. I tell him everything I’ve just told you. Only probably in a lot more detail, because this is seventeen years ago, and maybe my memory has faded a bit. At the end I blow out a big breath. I feel kind of naked.

  ‘He just sits there silent, staring down at his drink. He’s got these lines running across his forehead, like a frown, like he’s concentrating. They’re the longest seconds of my life. And then he sighs. He looks up at me and shakes his head. He seems to have gone very quiet. He almost looks upset. “I always knew that one day I’d meet Kathleen,” he says. And he tells me this incredible story. You ready for more?’

  ‘Keep going. I’m listening.’

  ‘Okay. He grew up in Akron, Ohio. You know where that is?
It’s a pretty straight place, somewhere in the middle. It’s football and cheerleaders, that kind of place. By the time he was twelve or thirteen he was an outsider at his high school. He told me he already knew he was gay by then, and that was fine, but the problem was that the rest of the world knew too. He hated every minute of it. He had six brothers and sisters, in a busy, close family, very stars and stripes. The family was kind enough but there was no gentleness, no privacy, no solitude in his life. He dreaded going to school. He was always being teased and pushed about. He’d rush home from school at the end of each day. If he was quick, there was a time in the afternoon, for an hour or less, when he might have some time to himself. He would go into his room, which he shared with some older brothers, and lie down on his bed and try to relax. In this way he discovered, on his own, how to survive the awful times at school.

  ‘So every afternoon he’d lie on his bed. Doing absolutely nothing. Just staring at the ceiling. And after a while of doing this every day, he felt something start to happen. He floated up above himself. He could look back over his shoulder and see the room from a different perspective. He said the first time he saw himself down there, lying on the bed with his eyes shut, he got a shock. But it’s comfortable and he keeps doing it. He had this special thing. He discovered this special, secret thing. After a while he can leave the room and travel around the neighbourhood. It was just like flying, he said, without making any effort. Every afternoon he left his body behind in the bedroom and the ghost part of him zoomed around Akron.

  ‘Eventually he’s doing this thing with perfect ease. Like getting better at driving, yeah? And he starts shooting off into space. It’s just a progression, you see. Once you’ve made the first step, the move away from the body, the question of distance becomes less important. He said there was nothing profound about this. He wasn’t really aware of what he was doing; it was just for thrills, like a roller coaster. He was a thirteen-year-old boy. He loves the way he can go straight up, on and on. He said the sky turned from blue to black really fast. He said when there was no more atmosphere there was no more sound, just the silences of space.

  ‘But the thing he loved the most was building up speed on the return from space. There’s the curve of the earth coming into view now and there’s the United States and there’s the Great Lakes and suddenly he’s swooped down into daylight and Akron takes shape and he can let himself glide down to his street and his house.

  ‘Then one day something happens. He plunges back to earth from space and he bursts into the light of atmosphere and—bang! He doesn’t know where he is. It’s not Ohio! He’s hovering in the air above a high cliff and a wild sea. It’s very green countryside and it’s almost deserted. There’s a woman with long hair in a long dress standing on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the water. And Daniel can feel the woman’s despair, and suddenly the roller-coaster game is no longer just play. You’ve got to remember, this is a young boy. He’s not sure what’s going on. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I’m trying to imagine,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to get past my goose bumps.’

  ‘Well, yes, you know what’s coming, don’t you? He said he just went down lower out of curiosity at first. She was the only person for miles around. When he came closer, he knew she was about to jump. And he wanted to save her, to stop her. He thought if the two of them together could share their loneliness, then they would no longer be lonely and she would not need to die. All he did was try to move closer to her. He told me he only wanted to do two things: to stroke her hair and to tell her it was all right. That’s all he did, he said. He was stroking her hair but his hand moved right through it. He tried to give her all his love. “What’s your name?” he said to her. “Kathleen,” she said. He stood behind her stroking her hair for as long as it took to know that she would live now. He stood for a long time, so happy to be in love. Then he opened his eyes in the bedroom in Akron.

  ‘He tried to go there again but it never worked. For a year or more he continued to leave his body at will, but he couldn’t find Kathleen or the place where he’d first seen her. And then suddenly one afternoon, without even trying, he was there. But not at the cliffs. He was about two miles away, in a village on a harbour by the sea where Kathleen was to be married that day. And somehow he knew he was saying goodbye. He found her alone in a room. “I have to go now,” he told me he said, “but everything gets better from here for you, and life will be good.”

  ‘Do you see what happened? Her life had meaning from the point where she met him, and his had meaning from saving her. Up until they met, both of them thought they had no use in the world. Of course, everyone has a particular use in the world. It’s a matter of finding out what that is. There’s a whole lot of people living without purpose. He never saw her again after that day. He told me he watched the wedding from a high distance, but that already Akron was growing stronger. We were sitting in that dingy bar in New Orleans and it seemed he’d been talking for a very long time. We’d barely touched our drinks. I just sat there, dumbfounded. I asked him, “What then?”

  ‘“After that,” he said. “After that, I somehow survived high school, I gradually forgot about my little ability— zooming is what I’d named it—and life rolled on. In Akron I taught myself, through pain, that it’s okay to be different. Then I moved to New York—where else would you go?—and learnt that it’s good to be gay. And here I am: in a bar with you in New Orleans. Total strangers and yet evidently not. I just can’t believe this is happening. I mean, I can, but I’d sort of forgotten to expect it. I did always know that I’d one day meet Kathleen. I just didn’t know that she’d be a Portuguese sailor called Laura!”’

  I finally laugh, a release of air and tension. ‘Wow,’ I tell her, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ We lie for a while stroking each other’s faces. My head is swirling with her story. My body has floated away, as if the last three days have existed in a spirit-world. As I stroke her I try to consider what our meeting could mean. She may not be telling me what my use in the world is; I would never expect or presume as my due the luxury of such assistance. But surely she is pointing out that such a search is worthwhile, is possibly all there is. The Great Worthwhile. With a jolt the image enters my mind that on the prow of some ship, on a vast expanse of ocean, I inhale the wind, and into me flood the vagabond aromas, the sandalwood and spices, of that port, my home, where I have never been. Meeting Laura brings me closer to the horizon that I am watching unceasingly. Laura is a blink in my unflinching gaze and yet in that single blink I surrender, let go, relax and learn all there is to know, in a dream world, where time expands like a mushroom cloud. And whether the story of Kathleen and Daniel is true seems less important than the fact that two people, however bizarre the circumstances, have made a link. My heart is out of kilter with the world, and it is a form of salvation to assume this is only a temporary condition.

  ‘So, Isabelle.’ Laura snaps me out of my thoughts. ‘Let’s get room service. Some breakfast. I’m starving. And then well say goodbye, though maybe not forever.’ She kisses me on the forehead. ‘Hot chocolate and a tartine to dip in it, or some croissants.’

  ‘That sounds good.’

  ‘Like I said, I tell it rarely. Well, you can see why. It’s a true story. Bonds and recognition. I’m not saying I ever dropped in on you from space when you were Cleopatra. I’m just saying there is no coincidence. I’m just saying that if the mind is prepared for the necessary thing to arrive in it, then sometimes, if providence is moving, that thing will appear. It’s not miraculous, as in unexplained magic. But being at sea for long enough has taught me that life is a miracle. Even if for many people it stops short. And what a shame. You know, I believe you have to work pretty hard to close your mind to wonder. But most of the world succeeds.’ ‘So do you believe it?’

  ‘Do I believe what exactly?’

  ‘Well, you know, the whole thing.’

  ‘I don’t know what I believe. All I know for sure is that what happened on
the bunk in my cabin was real. It may have only been a very strong dream, but it was a real dream. And it happened after I met Daniel in the cafe. And the story he told me was after my dream. Maybe he’s just weird, insecure, a compulsive liar. Maybe after I told the dream to him, he made up that story on the spot. Anything is possible.’

  We laugh. ‘Well, it’s a damned good story either way,’ I say. ‘Do you ever see him?’

  ‘We stayed friends. We kept in touch for ten years or more. Then we had a falling out. It was one of those stupid things, some trivial reason. I always planned I would get back in touch, patch things up. It was just temporary. You get angry then a while later you swallow your pride. Real friendship is elastic like that, you see. But that was it. A couple of years later I found out he’d died.’

  ‘How’d he die?’

  ‘You know, AIDS. Pneumonia from AIDS. God, he was sweet.’

  ‘Life is short.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s what fado understands. That’s what saudade understands. That everything is departure.’

  Snow

  MY BRIEF TIME WITH LAURA LOOPS IN MY MIND like some bizarre and joyful fragment of a super-8 film. It is hard to understand that if Matt had not died then I would not have come to Paris and would not have met her. The months bleed together until winter comes. In December in Paris I experience weather colder than I’ve ever known before. And snow, which I’ve waited a lifetime to see and to touch. It’s the Australian condition. North of the Snowy Mountains, at least. For as long as I can remember I have tried to imagine the texture of snow. Christmas in Australia—the sizzling hot days, the sunburn, the flies—made snow a substance rarer than gold, more exotic than titanium.

  The fortuitous intermeshing of events. And how the sublime emerges from pain. Like everything else that happens after the death of Matt, there is a hallucinatory quality to my experience with snow. At times I come to believe that something has changed in the way my eyes work.