I worried Kenji might get seasick. I don’t think he knew his fingers dug into my hip. I called out, “OK, my Love?” but Baby didn’t reply. He gazed at the horizon with the wind pushing his black curls & slapping him in the face, with all the rage & darkness of his history, all his fragility & all that’s left of his life that he threw into his riskiest gamble ever: me.
Letting him down scares me more than anything.
Baby’s idea was to go to one of the downed airplanes or modern shipwrecks that “encircle the whole Island in waste & failure & buckling corpses” as he put it (sigh). My idea was to do it around Challenger Bank, an underwater mountain about 13 mi offshore. Its highest point is 50 m below, & it’s full of unexplored caves & sinkholes. Baby’s idea had to do with hiding in plain sight. My idea had to do with vanishing. The wrecks are only a few miles off Bermuda in just a couple m of water, shallow enough for scuba tourists. The mountain gets far fewer visitors, & none of them except the whales can go as deep as the water goes. I got Kenji to agree with me pretty easily. (Right now I think he’d agree if I said let’s buy a submersible.) I told him outright I don’t want him thinking about “waste & failure” & staring at airplane skeletons in the middle of the ocean with a power drill in his hand. & hey, who knows if we’ll get lucky with a sinkhole?
I didn’t talk about the sinkhole for chuckles, I’m too freaked out for chuckles, I feel like half of me just broke off like a piece of sandstone cliff, & I know the missing half isn’t just Martin, that’s the thing, it’s a piece of myself that’s turned into a shade, the piece that thought ya girl had it all figured out. Life in general, stuff like that. & Kenji’s right it hurts like a phantom limb, & I think Kenji has to be the one to do something about it, that’s just how it is. He could do something about it if he was himself, but Baby’s not himself, & if he’ll ever be himself again depends a lot on me—Kenji is everything now, he is everything—but maybe it doesn’t just depend on me, & what’d I just say about me anyway?! As I drove our little blue boat straight into nowhere, I worried like crazy about my wounded Love “dissolving in oceanic molecules,” going overboard by accident or on purpose. I clamped my arm around his waist & took up one-handed boat steering.
Ethelberta’s GPS thingy told us when the mountain was maybe underneath us kinda-sorta. I slowed the engines down. Baby put his nose in my hair, gathering strength, & then he started pulling away to get ready, but I held onto him. We’re not very good at the GPS thingy. We’re used to using Bermuda to navigate, but we couldn’t see Bermuda. Either cuz we’d gone too far or the gray in the water was seeping into the sky or the sun couldn’t stand to look at us no more. We were the only boat out there. I doubt even the whales were there.
& another problem. Kenji didn’t have to see my face to see the problem, he felt it in the way I held him without looking up. Or he’d seen it already in what I’d written, & he understood it cuz of what he’d written. He reached over & cut the engines. A gust of silence swept in. Without the reefs to calm them down, the waves sent our little boat swinging side to side.
Kenji said, “You don’t want to let her go. You think Aetna Simmons was the biggest adventure of your life. You think she took you out of yourself in a good way. I get it. But you got lots more to do, Nabi, OK?”
“You too, Kenji.”
“& I’ll love you like crazy all the way, just like you are, all complicated like that.”
He brushed my lips with his but quickly. We went to the pointy end where we’d put all our stuff. On one of the cushiony benches, we made a stack of phone books & wrapped it in duct tape.
This year’s phone book has a cover picture of the Arboretum. Baby & I looked at each other when we saw it. It cut into Kenji’s voice. His voice cut into the dirty-cotton clouds, the ocean’s splish-splosh as we swung:
“Aetna first. You get the rest.”
I kept him in tackle range while I got out a screwdriver. I got out her HD.
The HD of Aetna Simmons, the original. A small rectangle I’d wormed out of its laptop body. Silvery on one side, green on the other, 6.8 cm long & not even 1 cm tall. Kenji held it in his hand. “This is everything she did.”
Well, technically, it used to be. Till I erased it all with sanitizing software. Poor Kenji seemed to have forgotten that. I didn’t say nothing. He held the HD in both hands.
“Every death. Every becoming. This blunt thing. This rigid thing.” He sounded weak & sick. He stroked the HD. Just once. Maybe instead of aluminum & nickel phosphorus, my Love saw the dark shapeshifting ghost who threw herself into the ocean in his imagination when it ran off all harum-scarum. Maybe the look of agony on Kenji’s face was cuz he was at a crossroads, & in the dark in front of him was the decision to lose Aetna forever or join with her forever & lose everything else, & I in’t having none of that.
“Let me do it, my Love.”
“No, Nabi.”
Kenji duct-taped the HD to the stack of phone books. He put on a snorkel mask like I’d told him, he plugged the drill into Ethelberta’s outlet, he stood in front of the bench & used his knee to brace the phone books against Ethelberta’s hull, he pointed the drill at the HD. My Kenji. & no, this isn’t the proper way.
“Stay back, Nabi.”
I told myself I wouldn’t think about Python & shadows, the woman clutching our ad from the Yellow Pages, Kenji writing & writing.
“NABI?!!”
Like jumping up in the middle of the night, except the cry was my name too. I rushed to him, I slid my arms around him, Kenji holding a power drill like it was a pistol & shaking head to toe. I put my lips to his back, I put my hands over his. I squeezed, Kenji squeezed. The shrieking of the drill ripped thru both of us.
We drilled 10 holes in her HD platter & controller board. I don’t know if we meant 10 or it just happened. I had to tell Kenji to stop.
He didn’t want to stop. His voice was all torn up. “Get the others, Nabi.”
Aetna’s clone. Aetna’s RAM. The storage chips & SIM cards in our phones. HD from my laptop. HD from Kenji’s laptop. “Aetna Simmons’ Final Words,” Pauline’s phone number, Char’s phone number, Erik’s incriminating vmail: “Aetna Simmons” was all over our flat little silver boxes which looked almost just like hers. Like our hearts & lungs & nerves are almost just like hers. I held Kenji from behind & Kenji held the drill & the drill butchered everything we’d done. So I can never get it back, all those bits of code I wrote, all the notes I took on what I learned. Kenji’s archives from Harvard, the unfinished thoughts he never went back to, they won’t get to be anything now, Kenji’s unnamed confession, Kenji’s suicide letter to me. I begged him not to, I cried for the Harvard stuff & the unfinished things that never had a chance, but it was like my Kenji was consumed by our destructive frenzy. He didn’t say a word when I put the SIM card from his “business” phone under the drill with all our other ghosts & maybes. I wanted to save our laptops, what was left of them, I told him we could put new HDs in easily. But Kenji, oh, my Baby, he threw everything overboard, every last microchip. We weighted down each thing with bunches of teardrop-shaped bits of lead, fishing sinkers held on with duct tape. Kenji threw the things in all different directions, he threw them as hard as he could.
He threw hers last. The original. I imagined it sinking, sinking, sinking, & nothing about its body would help it stay afloat, sinking into a sinkhole that got too narrow as it sank, so the little box got stuck sinking in the sinkhole, more waste, another corpse. & Kenji watched it sink. He kept watching after it was gone.
He wouldn’t let me do any throwing. Baby said the worst was yet to come. He said I should save my strength for the worst. He refused to lie down after everything disappeared under the water, but he wasn’t doing well at all. He said, “Please Nabi, get us out of here.”
I tried to turn an exact about-face. Then I realized I should check the GPS thingy cuz the ocean’s got its own min
d, the ocean could’ve spun us around without us knowing. I turned us so the GPS said we were heading sorta north. & mercy I have never been so relieved to see Bermuda in my life, I even said, “Kenji, look, it’s Bermuda!” even though none of us felt like talking. I saw Gibbs Hill Lighthouse 1st. Then lights in the houses along the shore, then Pompano Beach & the last bit of sunset in the sky. Kenji was at the wheel with me & then he wasn’t.
He was vomiting over the side. & the thing is boats don’t have brakes. Ethelberta took a century to stop.
It was like the ocean grabbed him by the throat & tried to yank him in. Worse than that, it was like the ghosts we thought we’d killed rose up out of the ocean & wanted to make Kenji one of them by ripping him out of himself & eating him. I hunkered down, gripped his shoulder, braced his forehead, “Baby, we’re safe.” & Kenji heaved, the darkening Atlantic all up in his face. We hung over the edge, half in the boat & almost in the water. I said, “Don’t give her any more of you. Don’t grieve for her, she doesn’t want it. & don’t be scared for her either, my Love. Forget her. That’s what she wants.” I tried to sound brave instead of hanging-off-a-building terrified, not thinking of how Martin didn’t come to the door, didn’t watch us drive away. I wanted to be solid instead of shrill, but I wasn’t, not when I said, “I in’t letting you go,” meaning get the Hell back in this boat or we’re both going over!
Kenji let me draw him back in. But mercy, he was crashing. He vomited in Ethelberta’s emergency bucket until he had nothing left, & still the sickness flogged his hidden parts. When it finally took a breather, we headed for the wheel, but on our way there Baby sat down hard on the floor without meaning to! I got him up again but barely, Ethelberta’s got these movable vinyl panels that can make the whole pointy end into a lounge bed, & Kenji collapsed there, Zohytin’s vengeful ghosts overwhelmed him from inside.
We lay face-to-face in the middle of the sea. We used our double-wide sleeping bag as a blanket. We couldn’t talk, I just stroked the back of Kenji’s neck. Ethelberta cradled us, the ocean rocked us not too gently, making a sucking sound against the boat. & no, there was nobody at the wheel. & what did I just say about the ocean’s mind? It’s stupid to not pay attention, people die from it, K & I know that better than anyone, but for once I felt like I was making the right choice about what to ignore. Night coming fast & cool. Our little Island sinking into darkness, shrinking to the size of the light from the lighthouse. The light reached for us & pulled away, passed over, slipped away, came back. I gave Baby a kiss & went & got one of our storm lanterns so I could look only at him. When I got back, Kenji had his hands over his face.
I let him mourn. I know what I said about not grieving is impossible. I kissed the creases in his face & didn’t make him tell me who his agony was for. An image of her hand & our Yellow Pages ad got into my head, just her hand & the torn-out page. Then the little yellow house & Martin’s face when he made us leave it. & those images stuck. I know they could get infected, I know how we’d feel if they got infected, I know cuz of Kenji’s nightmares & the Unfinished Church, & I clung to him & mourned. The lighthouse waved its filmy hankie in the sky & took it back.
Baby didn’t even twitch when I started the engines. Could’ve set a course for home, but something in me understood it’d be dangerous to stop, we couldn’t make ourselves try again if we gave up. & if we tried to do it at the apartment or marina, people would hear us or smell us & say something.
I know when my sweet genius envisioned this “operation,” he was thinking of Bermy’s more remote outlying islands, the kind that’re just rocks barely big enough to stand on. But the only one I could think of after Kenji fell so heavily asleep was this cute little place he & I enjoy on weekdays when nobody else bothers. I don’t know what its name is, it must have one, Bermudians name everything, but anyway instead of heading to Dockyard I took us under Watford Bridge, & there it was.
If we had the energy, we could cover the whole rock at a stroll in about 3 mins. It’s got a couple casurina trees, beautiful formations of black stone in the water, a little beachy semicircle nestled among the stones, cozy bit of seagrass easy to anchor in. That’s it. It was too dark to see any of that stuff when we got here.
I do see a resort when I look across the water to the main Island. So I mean, this place isn’t ideal. Any old so-so tourist could look across & see our little fire if we ever get around to it. You’re not supposed to light fires on the beaches, I hate it when I stumble on the stinky remnants of people’s charcoal. Anyway, when we got here, the sprawl of pink bungalows was just a sprinkling of sparkles in the dark. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. Knowing the resort was there made me feel something like loneliness.
I knew I wasn’t lonely. In the pointy end my lifelong love was running a fever. That meant he was fighting with every cell in his body, fending away the past, all for me. But watching Kenji fast asleep, the lights from the resort over his shoulder, quiet little sconce-lights that jumped into the water & wriggled toward us without reaching us, I felt a new kind of confusion, totally unfamiliar like something mythical, nightmarish—like an invisible monster pouncing on me from behind. I started worrying I’d passed on my existential crisis to Ethelberta! Ethelberta was built for pleasure & sunshine, not for covert missions of destruction, not for imaginary monsters that each of us tried to fend off all alone. Ethelberta was for me & Kenji to be comfy in together & no one else.
Sure I know what I gotta do, but it’s scary & I’m small & tired & hurting! I took one look at the 40-odd-lb anchor & knew I’d drop it if I tried to lift it by myself. Instead I slipped my legs under the sleeping bag with K, sitting up & leaning on Ethelberta’s padded backrest. The water lay flat like it had drifted off to sleep in the embrace of all the reefs & little islands that are Bermy. Kenji moved his head into my lap without waking. I turned down the lantern so it wouldn’t hurt his eyes, then I couldn’t see his face but my fingers found him by themselves. I was stroking his cheek when I realized that weird confusion wasn’t as sharp or pressing as I’d thought.
I opened my book. On the bench between the lantern & where we rested in shadow.
The last thing in my book was “Existential Crisis 101.” So I started with “How Not To Get A Power Drill In Bermuda” aka that very morning. Which is yesterday morning now.
I wrote all night. I wrote thru dawn. I kept an eye on the resort, the bridge, the black stones in the water easing out of the dark. If the boat drifted too far from the island or too close to the stones, I got up & moved it to a safe spot over the seagrass. Then I wrote some more.
It was weird, I was sleepy, but I didn’t seem to get any sleepier. I didn’t want to write what I was writing, I even cried some of the time (like when I wrote that K said, “Can we…I mean, I guess, can I…”), but I couldn’t stop writing & knew I shouldn’t. Baby woke each time I moved, but he was dangerously tired, exhausted in every way, I just had to say “We’re OK” & he drifted off again. Like we’re home right where we are. We’re not home, we don’t have food or different clothes or anything. Sometime I got up to pull Ethelberta’s sunshade over the pointy end. When I sat down, K said, “I’m real sorry about this, Nabi.”
He lay on his belly, I rubbed his back. “Rest, my Love, don’t worry.”
“What’re you writing?”
Baby knows I can’t be trusted when it comes to my book. I’m addicted to my book, I write stuff that can’t be read.
I said, “Martin. You know.”
K & I looked at each other for a while. He took my hand. The one that wasn’t writing “see his love & soak it up…that strength of his, the courage to go on…”
“Take as long as you want, OK?” He meant it, he knows what writing is. But I can’t make Kenji wait for us like that no more. He closed his eyes & a line showed up, left of his nose. That line means a headache, I brought Tylenol & water, but he shook his head. I rubbed his back until he sle
pt.
Then I scrawled for both of us. Cuz of what we’d come out here to do.
I wrote all day. A day & night of writing!
Kenji sat up slowly when the sun was almost gone. He was dizzy, he didn’t think we could lift the anchor either, even with the 2 of us. If we weren’t pooped we would’ve laughed at all the moaning & groaning we did just to get into our bathing suits. We tied Ethelberta to a sticking-out bit in a stone formation in the water. Our knot was pathetic, our arms were too tired. & we still had to wade onto the beach, hauling charcoal on our shoulders to keep it out of the sea.
I told Kenji he could help carry the charcoal only if he let me set it up, gather sticks, & deal with starter fluid by myself. Poor Baby had to agree, he sank down on the sand, I could tell he ached all over, he looked like part of him was having trouble waking up. So I built our “funeral pyre.”
After that, I was too shaky to get a match going. Kenji had to do it. Kenji lit the fire. Then he held me in his arms. We watched the smoking pile of sticks.
Kenji said, “I’ll do it for you if you want.”
I wanted to say no, I should be the one to do it.
But this will be a break, & I am brittle, & I’ve learned to feel it. I shrank against my Baby.
“Together?” I said. What a wimp.
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 46