Isle of Man

by Ryan Winfield

  Then comes cooked meats that actually smell pretty good. Chops and bacon, sausages and ham. The meat is followed by bowls of shaved coconut, and others filled with coconut oil or coconut cream. They pass community drinks down the long, floor-laid buffet. I avoid the milky drinks, and wipe the ones filled with coconut water with my sleeve before raising them to my lips. Jimmy seems to be enjoying himself. He sits beside me and eats without reservation, even making conversation with one of the portly dancing girls on his other side.

  “Whatcha celebratin’?” Jimmy asks, leaning across me and addressing William.

  “Come again?” William grunts, his mouth filled with food.

  “The feast,” Jimmy says. “What are ya celebratin’?”

  William looks confused. He slurps up a piece of pale flesh dangling from his lips and leans closer to Jimmy, crowding me. “Nothing special,” he says, his stinky breath wafting over me. “We do this every night ’cept Sundays.”

  When William turns away, I lean into Jimmy and speak in a low voice: “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Why?” Jimmy asks. “Let’s jus’ go with the flow.”

  “But don’t you see what this is?”

  “What what is?”

  “These people. That whole skit back there.”

  “Seemed like some kinda show to me,” Jimmy says.

  “Remember that ship we saw? The one in the reef?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well these must be the descendants of the cruise ship passengers. It’s all pretty clear, isn’t it? Some of them must have survived the Park Service drones by imitating pigs. Now they’ve evolved to look like them.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy says. “So what if?”

  “Well, they’ve got it all wrong. There wasn’t any flood. And this sure isn’t America.”

  “Well, how do we know it ain’t?” Jimmy asks.

  “How do we know? Don’t be stupid. This isn’t all the land that’s left. You know that much. And we just came ourselves from North America.”

  “Maybe,” Jimmy says. “But didn’t you grow up bein’ told none of this was up here period? And that sure ain’t true. How do we know how anythin’ really happened, ’cept by what we’s told?” He pauses to drink from a bowl passed by the girl on his other side. “And besides,” he continues, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and passing the bowl to me, “no one likes a know-it-all.”

  William whistles to quiet the crowd.

  Hands freeze, suspended halfway between troughs and mouths. Bowls clatter as they’re set down. A baby cries, but is quickly hushed by its mother.

  “It’s time to give thanks,” William says, nodding to the old man, now seated at the other end of the floor-table.

  The old man reaches over and seizes up a baby by the legs and lifts it flailing above the table and holds a knife to its neck. Before I can even open my mouth, a woman screams—

  “No!” She leaps from her seat and pulls the baby away from the knife. “You old blind bastard!” she shouts, cradling the baby in her arms. “That’s my baby, not a piglet.”

  The old man mumbles an apology and turns and reaches into the wallow beside the table and, with some labor and much squealing, manages to snatch a piglet and lift it up to the blade. He leans in close and inspects the piglet with one milky eye, as if performing a public display of due diligence. Then he slashes its throat and catches the gushing blood in a bowl.

  I feel my stomach retch, but I hold down my vomit. Even Jimmy looks a little pale. When the flow of blood slows to a trickle, the old man hurls the dead piglet into the wallow where it is immediately set upon by other hungry pigs. Then he sips from the bowl, wipes the blood from his chin with a gouty knuckle, and passes the bowl of blood. I begin to panic as it makes its way toward Jimmy and me.

  I elbow Jimmy.

  “I’m not drinking that.”

  “We better jus’ do it,” Jimmy says. “Seems like it’s custom or somethin’.”

  When the bowl of blood reaches Jimmy, he holds it in both hands, pausing to scan the crowd. All eyes are on him. He glances at me and shrugs, then lifts the bowl to his mouth and drinks. He passes the bowl to me with a look of silent apology. I immediately pass it on to William.

  William hands it back.

  “You must drink,” he grunts.

  I shake my head.

  “I’m not drinking this.”

  An even deeper hush falls over the group. I feel everyone’s eyes on me as I hold the offering out, my hands trembling, the thick red blood sloshing around in the bowl. William won’t take it, so I set it down in front of him. He slides it back toward me.

  “You drink,” he says. “Otherwise God will punish us.”

  I push it back.

  “I’m not drinking that poor pig’s blood.” The defiance in my voice surprises me. “And besides, there is no God. At least no God that would flood any place. So you don’t need to worry about being punished for anything.”

  William takes a long, stilted inhale through his quivering nostrils, then stretches open his mouth and lets it out in what might be a silent roar, or maybe just a yawn. He turns his beady eyes on me.

  “You tire me with these childish antics,” he says. “Just drink so we can move on to the entertainment.”

  “I won’t drink that blood.”

  “Eh then!” someone calls. “Let’s drink his blood.”

  “Pigs’ feet and human snouts!” the squeaky one shouts. “Let’s cut the spies and bleed them out.”

  William reaches into his trough, grabs a fistful of slop, and hurls it down at Squeaky, silencing the racket.

  “Enough!” he bellows, his lips pulled back and his incisors showing. “You act like children. Show some consideration to our guests.”

  “But what if they’s spies?” squeaks the sheepish reply.

  William turns back to me. “Are you spies?”

  “We already told you we’re not,” I say.

  “They’re not spies!”

  “If they was, they wouldn’t say it.”

  William shakes his head.

  “Tell me where you’re from?”

  I’m relieved to finally be asked one civilized question.

  “We came on a boat, well, a submarine, really. From the west coast of North America. And there was no flood. There are all kinds of other lands out there. This just happens to be an island.”

  William looks confused.

  “The stories tell of no other lands. And none are visible from the hill. But if there are other lands, there is certainly no other ’Merica.”

  “With all due respect, sir, this is not America.”

  “Lies!” someone screams.

  “Blasphemy!” another shouts.

  “I told you they was spies, Chief,” the squeaky one says.

  The old man snatches up his knife and crawls down the floor-table toward Jimmy and me. I’m frozen with disbelief. Is he really going to cut us? William pushes us back and meets the old man with balled fists. Then Squeaky leaps onto William’s back. William’s wife casts her baby aside and seizes Squeaky’s dangling leg and sinks her teeth into his calf. Someone pounces on Jimmy. I’m hit on the head. Arms grab me from behind.

  It’s all gnashing teeth and swinging fists and kicking feet. Then, suddenly, the entire mad brawl comes to an immediate halt, and all heads turn to stare behind Jimmy and me.

  Their faces are frozen with horror.

  Their beady eyes bulge.

  My captor releases me.

  As my senses return to my swirling head, I slowly crane my neck to see what it is they’re looking at. Junior crouches on the path behind us, his hackles up, and his canines exposed. He’s growling, bless his little heart. And his effect on the pig people is astonishing. They back away, coming together and crouching against the wall in a mass of pale flesh and pigskin.

  Jimmy picks himself up. We walk backwards toward Junior and the path. We’re almost to Junior’s side when one of the pig peopl
e lets out a hair-raising scream. The crowd parts, and I see Squeaky has caught his clothes on fire with a candle. He dances in circles, the fire getting worse as he does, and the others chase after him swatting at the flames.

  We turn and run.

  Junior races ahead of us, and we follow him up the path and into the tiny passageway, crawling on our hands and knees until it widens, then clambering to our feet and rushing through the pitch-black cave, following the sound of Junior’s yapping. Soon, we’re on an incline that steepens with every step until we’re climbing with our feet and our hands. I feel a cool breeze on my face. Then Jimmy reaches me a hand, and I scramble to my feet, above ground and free.

  As we rush in the direction of the beach, we nearly trip over our felled coconut tree. Without a word, Jimmy grabs an end, I grab the other, and we run with it toward the hill. Maybe it’s just the adrenaline pumping through my system, but this time the tree seems to weigh nothing at all. We carry it down the hill until we stride onto the warm sand and plunge with it into the cold water. We each wrap an arm around the tree and swim it in the direction of the submarine. Junior treads water beside us, taking turns going ahead to check on Jimmy and coming back to check on me. Then Junior climbs onto the floating tree and hitches a ride. He deserves it.

  We seem to be swimming forever, the tree moving slow in the dark water. I work my way up the trunk toward Jimmy so he can hear me.

  “Are we headed in the right direction?”

  “I think so,” he replies, sounding as breathless as I am.

  “But are we making any progress?”

  “I dunno,” he says.

  We swim for another twenty or thirty minutes, and I’m about to suggest we dump the tree and try to make it alone when I hear the professor shout from the deck of the stranded submarine.

  “Boys! Is that you?”

  We call back and adjust our course and five minutes later, we’re climbing aboard.

  Junior shakes himself dry next to us. Jimmy and I fall to our knees and hug his neck and kiss his wet face. He wags his tail with pride.

  “What on Earth happened to you?” the professor asks.

  “We’ll fill you in later,” I say. “Let’s hoist this submarine off the reef and hurry up and get out of here.”

  “The tide’s dropping,” he says, “but we can give it a go.”

  It takes all three of us and a rope from below to drag the coconut tree around to the front of the submarine. Once there, we hold the tree steady with the rope while Jimmy jumps in and helps lower the cut end down onto the reef, beneath the angled nose of the submarine. Thankfully, there’s plenty of tree above water to keep it weighted down. Once it’s wedged there good, Jimmy climbs back on deck, and we remove the rope.

  “I think we’re ready,” I say, inspecting the tree where it’s wedged in front of the submarine, slanting away over the water.

  The professor returns to the control room and floods the rear ballasts and maxes out the engines. Then he shouts from inside the control room.

  “Did he say ‘now’?” Jimmy asks.

  “I think he said ‘now.’”

  Jimmy goes first, scrambling up the leaning tree. When he reaches its end, he straddles the tree and calls back to me. The light from the open hatch doesn’t reach much of the tree, and it’s slippery climbing in the dark. I feel the tree bending beneath my weight. When I join Jimmy, we both cling to the top of the tree, bouncing to try and exaggerate our weight. It reminds me of an old childhood seesaw game in our underground park, except it’s Jimmy and me on the upside end and a submarine on the downside end. We bounce and we bounce. I hear the screw churning water against the back of the submarine. Junior stands on deck and yips encouragement up to us. Then Jimmy slides a little farther out on the tree, where it’s too narrow to sit, and rolls off and hangs there. I slide out and join him. We hang together, swinging our legs above the black water below. It feels and looks strange. As if the tree were growing from the black lagoon itself. Or perhaps as if in some alternate reality where the pig people’s flood really happened after all, this was the last holdout tree and Jimmy and I are clinging to it, refusing to surrender to the rising waters below.

  There’s a loud crunching sound, and the tree drops a foot. It takes everything I have to hold on. Then Jimmy lets out some kind of tribal yell and flails his legs. I join him, screaming into the night and swinging from the treetop. Another crunch, another drop, and then the submarine slides free from the reef and the tree falls over into the water with us still clinging to it.

  I’m momentarily tangled beneath the fronds of the floating tree, but I feel Jimmy’s hands in the dark water, pulling me free.

  “You okay?” he asks, once we’re treading water.

  “I’m gonna have another bump on my head,” I say, “but otherwise, I’m all right.”

  We swim back to the freed submarine and climb onto its deck. Junior greets us with a round of licks to our wet ankles. As the professor carefully backs us into deeper water, I scan the dark island hillside for any sign of pursuit from the pig people. I think I see a light moving between the trees. But before I can point it out to Jimmy, it’s gone, and I can’t be sure.

  Jimmy throws his wet arm around me.

  “You jus’ had to tell ’em they was wrong, didn’t you?”

  “You mad at me?”

  “No,” he says, smiling.

  “Good. I don’t like it when you’re mad at me.”

  “But that sure was crazy close.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Meteors and Antimatter

  “Wake up!” The professor shakes me in my bunk.

  “Ah, come on,” I say, rolling over. “It took me three hours to fall asleep. And why is it so hot in here?”

  “Because your little misadventure on the reef damaged the cooling system,” he replies. “I’m working on it. Now get up already. You sleep like a dead man.”

  “Is it my turn at the helm, or whatever you call it?”

  “No,” he says. “You need to join us on the deck.”

  “Why?”

  “Just come up,” he says, abruptly leaving the room.

  My head still aches from the other day’s punishment. First, I slammed it into the submarine window when we wrecked on the reef. Then one of those pig people clobbered me. And, as if that weren’t enough, the coconut tree fell on top of me when we freed the submarine. Thinking maybe I’m dehydrated too, I hop off my bunk and drink from the bathroom faucet before pulling my shirt on and heading for the deck.

  Jimmy and the professor are already there, the submarine left pilotless, moving at fifteen knots on a set course. The night sky is punctured by a million twinkling stars, some so bright they’re actually reflected in the black water.

  “This is why you woke me?”

  “Look,” Jimmy says, spinning me around to face the back of the submarine.

  A green phosphorescent trail glows in the water behind us, brightest directly behind the screw, fading as it narrows into the distant night. It appears we’re painting the ocean with light as we cut a shimmering path through the black water.

  “What is it?”

  “Phytoplankton,” the professor says. “Tiny creatures that are responsible for much of the oxygen you’re breathing. These ones happen to be bioluminescent.”

  “We called ’em sea ghosts,” Jimmy says. “I used to swim through ’em and watch myself glow.”

  “Oh, how sweet to be clothed in the nakedness of youth,” the professor opines. “But as beautiful as these plankton are, they’re not why I called you up here.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Look up and you’ll see,” he says.

  I stare up at the starlit sky and search the constellations. It never gets old, the novelty of looking at the stars. I remember growing up down in Holocene II and gazing up at the glowing benitoite in our cavern ceiling and squinting to pretend that they were stars. I never believed I’d really see one, let alone a night sky ablaze with th
em.

  A streak of light catches my eye.

  Then another.

  Appearing to originate from a single point, shooting stars blaze their fiery arcs across the night. It’s an amazing scene, to be standing on the dark deck of the submarine moving through the black water with a tail of green following us and meteors streaking overhead. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine us riding on a comet through the deep mysteries of space.

  “My mother said those were souls returnin’ to Earth,” Jimmy says. “But she didn’t know nothin’ about science and stuff, like you two do.”

  “Who knows,” the professor says. “Your mother may have been right after all.”

  “But aren’t they meteors?” I ask. “Particles of cosmic dust entering the atmosphere and burning up?”

  “They’re certainly that, also,” he says.

  “But how can they be both?” I ask.

  “How could they be only one?”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “Are you telling us you believe in human souls?”

  “No,” he says, “I’m telling you I believe in physics.”

  “Did you ever believe people had souls?” I ask.

  “That’s a long story,” he says.

  “We’ve got time,” Jimmy says,

  There’s a drawn out silence where I’m sure the professor has decided to keep his long story to himself. But at last, he clears his throat and speaks:

  “I was raised by my German grandmother in Michigan.”

  “Where’s that?” Jimmy asks.

  “Nowhere now,” the professor says. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Please continue.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” Jimmy adds.

  “My grandmother was a devout Catholic and brought me religiously to Mass. She was a woman of very few words, but her actions spoke loudly of her love. I don’t know if I believed in God, or human souls, completely, but I sure believed in my grandmother.” He lets out a long, sad sigh. “The fire started in the neighbor’s bedroom. Probably a cigarette, they said. By the time an alarm was raised, it had traveled across the shared attic into the other townhomes. I don’t remember anything about my escape except standing in the snow and looking back at the entire block burning. I was nine.”