Awayland

by Ramona Ausubel

  Summer notices that all the light is natural, tinted green by the jungle outside. There is not a bulb in the place. Summer worries then about power, about the necessary machinery for keeping a body alive under surgical stress. “Do you have machines?” Summer asks. The doctor taps his skull and smiles. She says, “No. Something to make definite of breathing?” Why, she wonders, does she have the instinct to speak bad English, in hopes of being understood? The doctor comes close to Summer and cups his ear around her mouth. “Breathing,” he says. “Same, same.”

  The doctor provides the couple with a series of pills. Kit tries to understand if these are herbs or vitamins or drugs, but the answer to every question is a welcoming smile. “You feel better. Thank you,” the doctor says. “Come back Monday.”

  * * *

  —

  WHY THE OTHER WHITE PEOPLE are here: to put on scuba gear and watch brightly colored fish deep below the surface of the clear, clear sea is the first reason. The second is to celebrate the moon. Probably the moon is an excuse to wear less clothing than is usually considered reasonable, and to dance as a pack or a tribe or a flock and spin fireballs above their heads so fast that they draw lines of orange in the darkness, and also the point is to swallow pills and smoke whatever comes around and, if they last long enough, to become even nakeder and pair up, get some of that soft sand in awkward places. Toward the end, when the sun has started to rise again, that’s when the people on the beach most appreciate the moon. Enough light to see by, enough dark to hide.

  Kit and Summer do not want to dance all night with other people their age who have traveled far to make bad decisions while barefoot. They do, however, want to watch from a distance, at least for a while. The restaurant at the resort at the top of the hill has a good view of the beach, is open late and is supposed to have good fish. You choose your dinner alive, and they smash the skull for you on the spot. The woman at their guesthouse says she’ll call them a taxi, but Kit looks up and he sees the resort right there above them. “We’ll walk,” Kit says.

  Bat wings sound different than bird wings. The leather of them slaps at the air. The jungle is thick and ragged with life. It feels like the trees are growing right this minute, adding new inches as Kit and Summer try to keep a path beneath. Rocks and bats and trees, and the small pocket flashlight is not enough to see by. Summer slips down a hill and her skirt comes up to allow a big bruise on her thigh. They arrive at a cliff, not a resort. Below them is the sea, not blue; at this hour, the sea is white.

  They stay on the cliff’s edge recovering from the hike. The sea makes a good song to rest to. The bass from the full-moon party reaches them faintly and they think of all those bodies moving together in the white light. Kit makes up a song and takes out some tamarind candies, which they share. They are hungry, but they do not want to risk the walk back until daylight. They’ll stay the night. At least here they can see where they are. At least here they know where the edge is. “We should put something on your bruise,” Kit says. Having no salve, he spits in his hand. “This will help,” he says, sweeping it across her leg. “This will heal.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR SUMMER, it becomes obvious she and her sweetheart are not great at organizing hand transplants. They are good at swimming and eating fish lunches and they found their way out of the jungle eventually, bravely. Her boy is so kind and helps teenagers get better at writing and he reads in the morning and he has a predictable breakfast order and no parents either—he’s perfect. But he’s not the man for this job just as she is not the woman for it. Maybe they got the address wrong. She has written to the surgeon every day, but he has stopped responding. She worries about him, because he is so reliable and, therefore, must be injured. Maybe the very fancy hospital was in Bangkok, where all the foreign ladies go to get plastic surgery cheaper and with discretion. The doctors there have all gone to Stanford and Harvard. That’s where the famous hand-guy is. She imagines that he has a collection of little moon bones on his windowsill and a Thai wife whose strange culture and luscious hair do not distract him from taking care of her like a full and complete woman, an equal, and they have three little mixed babies and another on the way and he’s working on a book about hands, which is really a love letter to what he thinks is the most magnificent invention the body has ever invented, not to mention the fact that the hands are indispensable for all other human inventions. Within this book there is a chapter, still just notes, about Summer and Kit and the beautiful story still to unfold of their joined bodies, of the ways they will hold each other and care for each other with hands that are not their own. Summer worries about the doctor and his unwritten book, the chapter he won’t be able to complete without her.

  She thinks of him, cutting and repairing bones and veins and muscles. She thinks of him enabling so much work for the bearers of these hands: hammering, hugging, winding the watch, flipping the egg, dialing up the parents, turning the key to drive home, washing the child’s hair, unbuttoning the wife’s blouse, twitching in sleep, writing the letter to say good-bye.

  This island is no place for major surgery. Summer writes a note about needing a walk, leaves her napping darling on the bed. It’s the first time she’s been alone in this foreign nation, and it surprises her how different it is. She feels skinned, permeable, a magnet for disease and danger. One of those full-moon dancers could be asleep in the bushes, still drugged and rabid and terrible and hungry for just the kind of ankles the girl possesses. Plus: wet and warm places are snake hangouts, and who knows how to tell the venomous ones from the non-. She hears various rustles and moves to the center of the road where the soft red dirt has gathered in a ridge between tire tracks. Her feet turn color and so do her sandals. If only the birds would quit alighting on branches and looking at her like they are ready to pick her clean.

  Summer takes her shoes off and waits for the doctor, whose low voice she hears in one of the rooms. A little boy comes out with a fresh bandage on his foot. His mother has an envelope Summer knows contains medicine. Everyone here has been taken care of, whatever the wound was is clean now, ointmented, covered. The woman and her child will go home and report the accident and the happy ending to the boy’s father.

  “Shark bite,” the doctor says to Summer.

  She thinks of all the swimming they’ve been doing. She thinks of the morsel of a leg. She thinks of the beachful of orphan dogs in the shallows.

  “Kidding. Jokes,” the doctor says. “No sharks here! Your country is sharks. He step on nail.”

  “Don’t cut our hands off,” Summer says. “Make up an excuse. Let my boyfriend down easy.”

  “Feel better?”

  “Do you understand?”

  The doctor is already walking away. “Watch out for shark!” He laughs. “See you Monday.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PLAN WAS DUMB, Kit knows that now. All this distance, but you drag your same old bones, your same old brain with you. Summer has not forgotten why they came here.

  So he goes to the doctor for a talk. The road is dusty and he admires the birds along his path. It smells like tea here, and he could eat the good fruits for the rest of his life and hardly anything else would be needed.

  “Look,” he says when he gets there. “I don’t know what’s going on here.” Kit and the doctor are standing in the hallway, which is dark, and there is a rusted scale and a bag of laundry hanging on a hook.

  “Thailand is holiday. You should not spend all of time at my office.”

  “I lied to my girlfriend, but I did it to be nice. We don’t want hand surgery. Please do not give us hand surgery, is what I’m saying.”

  “You are not married?”

  “No.”

  “Why wait? It’s better.”

  “She might be dying. She doesn’t want to weigh my life down. What will you say about the surgery? That there were technical problems?�
��

  “Try foot massage on beach. Try fresh coconut. Elephants for bathing are here. Eat first thing. Some people prefer suntan and dance music. Quiet OK, too. See you Monday. I’ll take good care.” The doctor closes himself into a room. Kit puts his shoes on. He hadn’t missed them.

  * * *

  —

  THE HOTEL HAS a brochure for deep-sea diving that advertises “an available friendly of small fishes.”

  “It’s irresistible,” Summer says. “Meaning we can’t resist it.” They have to go underwater with someone since they don’t know how. First, some information and a quiz, and a medical questionnaire. Summer sees this and gets nervous, already trying to decide if she will lie or not. She wants the available friendly, needs it even. She scans: pregnancy, head cold, history of heart attack, lung disease, epilepsy, head injury, blackouts. But nothing about general predisposition for death. Summer is relieved. She checks all the no boxes and goes to the mask area to try on masks. Their instructor is a blond from Australia with a high voice from all the oxygen-tank breathing and a neck tattoo of a mermaid twisted up with a serpent. He is responsible for their lives. He says, “Press this to your face and then suck in.”

  There is a trial swim in shallow water where they learn how to breathe again. It’s weird not to know. To have to pull hard to get that bottled air in, and then to blow it out and see the bubbles. They have to learn to clear water from their masks, and they have to learn to give each other air, in case one of them should run out when they are deep down. Summer takes a deep breath and then passes her sucker over to her beloved and watches his chest inflate. She’s anxious to get her breather back, even though she has always been able to hold her breath a long time. This is one of the things about herself that she knows and is proud of. Many vacations she spent in the pool daring boys to outdive her. She’d streak across the pool, letting the burn burn her lungs, and when she came up finally, the boys would be panting, holding the edge, questioning her humanness. They said, “Are you a fish?” but she remembers them calling her a sorcerer mermaid instead.

  Kit hands Summer his breather, and she sees him there in the water with her, his eyes magnified in the mask, tiny bubbles escaping his pursed lips. It’s terrible not to be able to kiss him then.

  Summer borrows a breath from her love.

  Descending along the rock wall, they look down and see progressively bigger fish below them. The water gets colder. Kit takes Summer’s hand for a minute before they let go to swim better. Coral is fingery and the little fish thread through. They see a turtle and an eel and a giant clam with luminous purple flesh. Kit admires the way a sandy spot looks in the blue cast of the water-light. Some fish nip at the rocks and coral, some fish eat algae off other fish. There is so much alive here that it seems staged. Summer swims at a big school of tiny silvers and they break for her, rejoin after a distance. The ancestors made a mistake, crawling out onto land, Kit thinks.

  Something glides past. The instructor makes butterfly wings with his hands to explain, but Kit and Summer are not watching him and would not understand his hand language anyway. They know it’s a ray. All these creatures are familiar from public-access television. But the ray flies, and Kit and Summer could not have predicted how that would stir them. Water is so much more generous than air; the ray hardly flaps its wings to soar.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING ARRIVES. Monday. It came after Sunday and before the Tuesday, and that should not have been a surprise. It had seemed so far away, and the impossibility of that notation: the fact that hand-replacement surgery was written on the particular square of the calendar made the day itself seem unlikely. But here it is, sunny and tired. Summer is up, spearing a slice of banana. She is wearing a white sundress. Kit takes his body through motion after motion. He brushes and washes and combs and dresses. He eats and drinks. See that? Just a day. The ocean is always and already churning. Kit imagines what’s underneath—everything is eating, everything is searching.

  They hold hands on the walk. Summer tells him that she is grateful for his help, for making this journey. Both of them think of home but neither says the word. No animals cross their path, no snakes. The birds in the trees that morning are ordinary and brown. Neither Kit nor Summer remembers their dreams and both wish they had, wish for a symbol tossed up from the unconscious.

  At the steps of the clinic, Kit and Summer kick off their shoes like they’re coming home. As if comfort is imminent.

  They are led by a woman into a darkened room with a cushioned floor. She gives them each a pair of loose pants and leaves the room. Kit and Summer put on the pants and sit down on the floor. They do not know what is happening to them. Each has asked for a reprieve, is here in hopes that the doctor will relieve them of their own story. Two women enter and kneel beside Kit and Summer, who lie down on their backs. The women climb on top, bend a leg around their own small breathing torsos. The bodies are tangled and bent. The women kneel on thighs, pull limbs up and back. It hurts, for Kit especially. How could someone so small be this crushing? Something strong and herbal is brewing in the room. This is an entirely new smell.

  His girl has her eyes closed and her body is making shapes Kit hasn’t seen it make before. He has a hard time catching his breath, and in this state, he realizes: it’s a massage. We’re getting a massage. He has a small woman on his chest, which keeps him from laughing like he wants to. He feels his blood moving through his legs when they are finally released back to the floor. His body, his head feel hot and good.

  Kit risks a joke. “This surgery is nice.”

  “Next time let’s switch legs.”

  Summer hears her beloved laugh. She wants to thank the doctor for this day, for these women who are crawling over the two of them and pressing joint to joint. The hotel has been recommending a massage every day. “No pain, no gain,” the waiter told them, pleased to know this Americanism. “Massage fix every problem.”

  Kits says, “Let’s get married. That’s what other people our age do when they feel this way.”

  The women place little warm steamed bundles of herbs along Kit’s and Summer’s bodies. The smell is delicious and nauseating at the same time. The women stretch Kit and Summer back into their normal shapes and then leave. The room is steamy and dark and this is what relief feels like. Kit reaches over and holds on to Summer’s thumb. It is not long before Kit and Summer fall asleep.

  * * *

  —

  SUMMER WAKES UP FIRST. She can’t find her balance in the room. She can see her love asleep next to her, his face this far away from where she’s used to seeing it. He’s beautiful—she should tell him this more. A memory floats in: she is a kid and she still has parents. They’re out for ice cream and Summer is sucking the gum squares out of her cone and spitting them onto a napkin. She always got bubblegum ice cream even though it was not the best flavor because you got two desserts in one. The bargainer in her had to make this choice. Her tongue was blue, she knew because she stuck it out and cross-eyed to see it. Her mother was saying something about a dog and her father was saying something about a roofer. A group of crazy people came in, each with his or her own strangeness. One was stooped and was hook-armed with a very short woman who limped. One was wearing too many shades of purple. One had the eyes that made it clear what her disorder was, and she carried a bright pink purse. Summer looked for the uncrazy person in the group, the one who was tending, leading, herding, but she couldn’t figure out who it was. Someone needed to be normal and adult, but no one looked it. Summer was worried for the crazies. She told her parents her concern and they both laughed at her. “She’s so conscientious,” her mother said, like this was an adorable but silly characteristic they hoped their daughter would grow out of. Like wanting to dance ballet, ride a painted pony, wear wide-hooped dresses. It was impractical to be the person she was. Better to grow a shell, to stop seeing so much. Summer ate her gums, one
by one, all their color sucked off already, her mouth too full. So much spit. She had to concentrate to keep from gagging.

  Summer picks up her hand to scratch her nose but she gets a big white bundle instead. Her hand is fatly gauzed. Like it’s been through something. Like an accident. Summer looks to her love and he also has a wrapped hand. She shakes her head around to wake it up. She almost shakes him, almost reaches out with her white mitt, but he’s too lovely, too asleep. Summer digs the end out of the gauze and begins to unwrap. There are many turns, and she feels the pressure release as she goes. She is impatient at the same time that she does not want to see what is inside. She imagines unwrapping her darling’s hand. She imagines blood. She imagines meat.

  Round and round, and finally she sees skin. She can’t tell if it’s her own because it is so swollen. Waterlogged. This hand looks twice the size of the one she used to carry around on the end of her arm. And at the wrist: a bracelet of stitches. X X X X. It is the way she would have sewn something, not knowing how to sew. Beneath, there is a clean cut. It is beautiful, the cut. The cut is absolutely perfect.

  The Lonesome Flats

  Club Zeus

  When Zeus knocked up Leto and Hera found out about it, she forbade the slutty girlfriend from birthing her twin babies on land. Leto rowed the seas until she finally settled on a floating island, which the resort where I’m working claims as our own spit of land, and where I am six weeks into an eight-week summer job before I return to the United States for my last year of high school. There are ruins in the cliffs above the resort, grand columned things in honor of Leto, goddess of motherhood, but here at Club Zeus, we choose to commemorate all those gods and goddesses differently—not that we don’t have columns. We have plenty. We commemorate instead with a statue of a big-titted woman in the middle of the huge pool. We commemorate with a make-out pad full of pillows floating in the bay and held up by concrete swans called “Delos,” after the island where Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. Mostly we commemorate with as many beverages as you can suck back.