by Abby Geni
My dreams were fitful. I was in a courtroom facing an angry judge. I was being accused of taking a life, an act I held no memory of. The jury seemed to be made up of the biologists on the islands. Lucy, in particular, looked forbidding.
My bedroom was cold at first, but it began to grow warmer until I was sweltering, even sweating. I threw off the sheet without fully waking. The dream shifted. The octopus appeared, slithering over the mattress, groping my flesh with his suckers. I could not get him off me. He was slick and wet, smelling of salt, his tentacles surprisingly rough. The dream changed again. I was undergoing torture now—some medieval device, two slabs of stone crushing me between them, like a flower being pressed and dried. It seemed vital that I remember the name of this device before it took my life. I could not remember it. I could not move my arms.
Gradually I realized that someone else was there. Breath on my cheek. Weight on my chest. Another presence. Something was shaking—the whole island, or else the bed.
It took me a long time to understand what was happening. That was the fault of the wine and the dreams. It was difficult to sift out the reality of the situation. I was still half-aware of the octopus, his suckers palpating my skin. There was pressure on my hips, pain in my belly. I could still hear the rough voices of my torturers, the squeak of their ropes. Then I understood the noise to be the bedsprings.
A man’s shape. A man’s body on top of mine. The medieval vise was, in fact, his rib cage, squeezing the breath out of me. His face was in shadow.
I was still calm, waiting for the dream to shift again, waiting to wake up. Maybe he would morph back into the octopus, tiny and damp. Maybe he was one of the medieval torturers. Maybe he was a stranger—a stranger had broken into my childhood bedroom—I was not in my father’s house—no stranger could have come to the islands. He must be someone I knew. My legs were stuck beneath his. My arms were stuck beneath his. I was no longer dreaming. The octopus and the ropes were gone. But the man remained. The terrible weight of his limbs held me captive.
I should stop there. You can imagine what came next. I will say only that it did not hurt—not exactly. Physically, it was just unpleasant. In retrospect, that does seem odd to me. I would have expected there to be an immediate, protective response: tensed muscles, torn tissue, pain. But my body, stupefied by wine and sleep, had stood aside to let him enter. In such a state, it could not distinguish between what he was doing and the act of love.
Then the sheet slipped off his shoulder. In the moonlight, I saw blond hair. A pale forehead. It was Andrew.
In that moment, everything splintered. I opened my mouth to scream for help. At once, his hand slammed across my lips. A kind of seizure overtook me. I wriggled like an eel, snorting against his fingers. I kicked against the dense, bony burden of his calves. His eyes were lifted above my head, a little dazed; he looked like a man on drugs. His hips went on pumping like a piston, but the rest of him was dead weight. He was in no hurry. He kissed me clumsily on the cheek, like an inexperienced teenager making the first move on a date.
I arched my spine, trying to work my arms free. I could not get even a few fingers loose. His palm was too broad and flat to bite. As rapidly as it had come on, the seizure passed over and left me limp.
After that, it gets harder to remember. Minutes or hours might have passed before he left me. I cannot tell you all the bizarre thoughts that passed through my brain. Lucy asleep in her bedroom downstairs. Charlene hidden inside her music. Galen, who was supposed to know everything that transpires here. Mick and Forest out staring at whales. Explorers on the moon. You—you—you. Your coffin. Your gravesite. Your bones, your musculature, crumbling into the earth. All the material elements that had once made up a living woman. Tiny particles of you, strewn across the world, carried on the rain. How we are broken down to just the essentials.
Andrew was still moving. He was panting and sputtering. I let my gaze roam around the room. I could feel the heat of his breath. I ignored him for a splash of moonlight on the wall. A tall, slim shape. One beam radiated outward like a raised arm. The curtains moved, and the figure trembled.
The ghost was coming into focus. I could almost see the dial swiveling on my mental camera, pulling her into greater and greater clarity. The swing of her nightgown. Her bony wrists. The plane of her cheek.
She was nothing like I had imagined. She was at once more and less real—raw, ethereal, icy. Her body was of an indeterminate density, shifting in the murk and moonlight. Her torso was a pearly smudge, her fingers as distinct as piano keys, her legs lost in a haze. Her eyes were dark holes. There was something weary in her expression, as though corporeality had cost her a great deal.
For the first time, I understood why ghosts were antithetical to photography. I was certain that she would never have turned up on film. She was like a column of salt dropped in water—soluble, permeable, mixing with the surrounding matter. The camera would not have been able to perceive her the way I did. Its mechanism was designed to replicate the action of the human eye—precise and objective—rather than the subjective, suggestible mind. I could not tell whether she was beautiful. Her face was too elemental to register inessential qualities like symmetry or shapeliness. Burning eyes. An oval skull. I could not find her mouth among the shadows. Her hair drifted in a wind I did not feel. Then her arm swung in a gesture of entreaty. The intent was unmistakable. A welcome, from one ghost to another.
11
YOU AND I binge-watched crime shows one winter. I had just turned thirteen. D.C. was an unpleasant place that year, a wasteland of icy pavement and billowing wind. Rain fell by the bucketload. Snow carpeted the parked cars. You and I sheltered on the couch, bowl of popcorn at the ready, watching episodes about cops and crime scene investigators. We would argue about whether the D.A. was on the take, which suspect had committed the violent act, whether the unwholesome brother-in-law might be hiding something. Usually these shows dealt with murder, but sometimes they would shift over to rape.
The attack itself was never handled with sensitivity. You would cover my eyes during the worst of it, but I was still able to get the gist. There was always too much exposed flesh, the camera lingering on a T-shirt being ripped off, lacy lingerie tossed to the floor. You used to comment that it was unsettling and exploitative. Invariably, when the assault was over, the victim would dash into the shower. Even as a child, I found this irritating. Everybody knew about DNA. Everybody knew to go to the hospital, where the nurses would get out the rape kit and find all the evidence written on the body. But no—that would have been too simple. If the victim had behaved logically, the show would have been over in ten minutes. Instead, she would crouch, shivering, in the shower, scrubbing beneath her fingernails where her attacker’s skin cells had collected when she scratched him. She would shove the sheets into the washing machine. She would burn the clothes she had been wearing. In the end, it would be up to the police, our heroes, to verify her story by interviewing witnesses and double-checking alibis.
That was how things struck me back then. But now I know better.
My first clear memory after the act is of sitting in the tub, clutching a sea sponge in both hands. A cold sprinkle pattered my shoulders. There was only one bathroom in the cabin, and the shower had plainly been tacked on as an afterthought, held to the wall by a suction cup. That night, there was no hot water. We had used it up doing dishes earlier. The frigid stream was peppered with flakes of rust. My teeth were chattering. My fingers were so numb that it was hard to manage the sponge. If someone had asked me what I was doing, I am not sure what I would have answered. Some powerful internal instinct had taken over, and all I could do was obey. Cleanliness. Safety. A rite of purification. A little more soap.
When I climbed out, my lips were ghost-blue in the mirror. It looked as though I had aged a hundred years. I stumbled to the toilet and threw up. I voided dinner, then lunch, then breakfast. I sank to the floor and vomited until the sides of my stomach banged together. It fel
t good to flush that mess away, watching it swirl down the drain.
I BARELY REMEMBER the days that followed. By morning, I had come down with a roaring fever. I can tell you this much: I was out of my mind.
The Farallon Islands were not designed for illness. Cuts and bruises, yes. Colds, no. There was no medicine in the cabinets. Our stock of aspirin had expired. I was too sick to go foraging anyway. I lay beneath the covers, limp and bewildered. The light through the blinds was a knife in the temple. The others had no sympathy at all. Galen and Forest refused to get anywhere near me. Even Charlene only poked her head in to flash a cheery grin, maintaining a safe distance.
It was Mick who kept me going. Without him, I probably would have died of malnutrition, dehydration, and loneliness. But he was tireless in his compassion. He came rushing to my aid, toting crackers and soup. He laid his calloused hand on my forehead and assured me that I would be better in no time.
For three days, I did not leave my room. Part of this was the illness—I was almost too weak to stand—but the greater part was Andrew. He had not varied his routine one bit. He was everywhere. He was always in the cabin. I heard him typing. I heard him in his bedroom right below me, humming as he flipped through a book. I heard him in the kitchen laughing with the others. If anything, his spirits seemed lightened.
I cannot explain what it was like to be so close to him. I might as well have been a rabbit trapped in a burrow. All the runs leading straight into the fox’s mouth. The fear was overwhelming. Even Mick noticed something amiss. A window would bang shut in another room, and I would jump out of my skin. The only solution I could come up with was to hide. For those three days, I did not shower. I did not even visit the bathroom. Instead, I made use of the old, dusty bottles and jars that had been scattered around my bedroom for decades. I would fill a glass container with amber liquid, which Mick, believe it or not, obligingly disposed of.
Looking back, I must conclude that Mick was raised by women, rather than men. A pack of three sisters, perhaps. A single mother, maybe. Somebody had taught him the kind of benevolent unselfishness that most women are schooled, in childhood, to offer unquestioningly—and few men ever attain. Throughout my illness, Mick was unflinchingly heroic. He sat on the end of the bed and watched me, making sure I ate my soup. He told me silly jokes to keep my spirits up.
On the third day, my fever spiked. Mick stayed close, bathing my brow with a cool washcloth and wrestling the covers back onto the bed whenever I threw them off. After a while I grew delirious. I shuddered and wept. I told him that I was scared. I said it over and over: I’m scared, I’m scared. It seemed vital that he understand this simple fact, yet I could not be sure I was making myself clear. Mick hurried out to soak the washcloth in cool water again. He stroked my hair. He told me that anyone who tried to hurt me would have to go through him first.
“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Don’t worry, Mel. I’ll handle it.”
ON THE THIRD night, I ran away. Mick had left me alone, tucking me in and heading off to do a bit of note-taking in the daily log. I lay beneath the quilt, staring out the window in a daze. Throughout my illness, I had continually lost time. It reminded me of the aftermath of your funeral—days torn from the calendar. I would blink and find that an hour had gone by. I would inhale and exhale, and in that instant, the sky would darken. Now I watched the clouds billowing across the horizon, moving with the speed of stop-motion video. The wind brushed the glass.
And then I heard it. A moan. A squeal of bedsprings. A gusty sigh. Andrew and Lucy were having sex downstairs.
I limped down the hall to the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet, attempting to throw up again, but nothing happened. I shuffled back to my room. I was weak enough that even this little jaunt exhausted me. Still, without pause, I bundled myself up under half a dozen sweaters. I hummed under my breath to block out any ambient sounds that might drift up through the floorboards. Gripping the banister, I descended the stairs. I left the cabin through the front door.
Even at the time, I was aware that this was a terrible idea. We all had been warned so many times. It was easy to get turned around at night on Southeast Farallon. The cabin and the coast guard house were not useful landmarks—dark shapes against a dark sky. The swiveling beam of the lighthouse was inconstant, disorienting. The roar of the sea came undistinguished from every point of the compass. There was no paved path. Many of the biologists had been injured, dislocating a knee or fracturing a wrist. I myself had been gutted by a sharp stone, and that was in broad daylight. I still bore the scar. Once, an intern had become so befuddled that he had spent an entire night hunched beside a boulder, unable to locate the cabin again, unwilling to imperil himself further by abandoning the meager shelter he had found. He had nearly succumbed to hypothermia before Galen discovered him the next morning.
And, of course, there were people who had disappeared. In the old days, when the eggers and pirates had overrun the islands, one or two men had vanished every season. They would go for a walk and were never seen again.
After a few minutes, I started shivering. There was a mist in the air, collecting against my skin like gauze. The moon was bright that night, bathing the flat surfaces in a blue glow. I thought I saw a figure ahead of me. It seemed to be moving toward the coast guard house. I squinted, my heart beginning to pound. But the shape melted away. There was no one else on the grounds. The fog often played tricks like this on the mind, tangling the moonlight in bright pockets, coating the air in planes of iridescent sheen.
During my time on the islands, I had, for the most part, ignored the coast guard house, as everyone did. Though it stood only a hundred feet from the cabin, a duplicate of our own home, we all left it alone, treating it like an optical illusion—a mirage in the desert, to be seen but not touched. Mick had told me that it wasn’t safe to try the porch steps of this ancient structure, let alone go inside. The floorboards would be rotten after so many years. Even the animals gave the place a wide berth. During the summer months, the gulls nested all over the islands, pitching camp on any free inch of grass. But they did not attempt to penetrate the coast guard house. Only the bats were bold enough to claim those empty rooms and eerie silences for their own.
Now I pushed the door open with a groan of hinges. The floor was spongy beneath my feet. My arrival disturbed the bats, who launched themselves into flight, filling the air with their frenetic wingbeats. The rooms were clean of furniture. A crumpled piece of fabric lay on the floor. It looked a bit like one of Forest’s ratty undershirts. The air had a stale quality, like the interior of a cave. I shut the door behind me. At once, I felt better. There is something fundamental in the desire to have a door to close, sealing out the rest of the world.
The exertion of my brief walk had left me dizzy. I was seeing spots. I sat down cross-legged. A bat flitted past my cheek. There were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. I could not quite see them—gray on black—but I could feel their bustle and flutter. They whirled like an indoor tornado. A swollen moon dangled above the horizon. The beam of the lighthouse swept across the sea. I listened to the pounding of the waves. I smelled mildew and rot. Nature was reclaiming the coast guard house. Mice and insects were in the process of destroying it.
There was a sound. I could not identify it—somewhere between a violin and a siren. It reverberated around the room, then dissipated. It reminded me of something, but I did not have time to consider the matter. The energy of the bats was increasing. They were moving fast, rocketing past my body, clipping me with their wings, brushing my cheek. They touched me over and over.
The bats began to rise. It happened all at once, as though they had received a command. I could see them spiraling upward in a column of smoky gray. Their wings shook the air. Everything seemed to be vibrating. My mouth was open. My palms burned. I watched the flock pour out through a broken window. Their numbers were enough to blacken the stars. They erased the moon.
Then I heard the sound again. A call. A keen
ing.
It was the whales. This time I recognized their music. The breeze came through the window, battering my hair out of my face. The bats swirled inside the gust. I could not get my bearings. I could not catch my breath. The harmony grew louder and louder until it thundered in my ears. The coast guard house seemed to be moving around me, or else I was moving inside it. For a moment I thought I was underwater. I screamed. My voice was lost in the song. I could feel the waves crashing over me—or the wind—or the bats. I thought the whales were there too. Something was surging in the darkness, sending out pulses of noise and motion. Massive bodies rolling in the tide. Their flippers disarranging the swell of the surf, knocking me off balance. Their tails scooping holes in the material of the world. They were coming for me. Their music made my body tremble, struck like a tuning fork. The sound was mournful and otherworldly, almost human, like a cry of pleasure or pain.
I must have dozed off. Maybe I fainted. When I came to, the coast guard house was empty and dark. In the stillness, I was alone.
12
I MIGHT EVENTUALLY HAVE made a more concerted break for freedom. I might have pushed the rowboat out on my own and headed for the mainland. (The Janus would have been smarter, but I could never have started that motor without aid.) I might have told someone what had happened. I might have told Mick, however daunting it would be, stepping into the bright glare of a spotlight, all my wounds exposed. I might have smashed Andrew’s head in with a rock. I might have leapt from my bedroom window, like a dewy chick tumbling from the cliff’s edge, not yet able to fly.