The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “We go down to the dock and they tell us it’s still gonna take a while. And then we go look for a restaurant, but we can’t seem to find one. We walk and walk and it’s all just falling-down structures and tires by the side of the road, and shrubs. It’s the saddest thing in the world. We’re freaking out. And then. All of a sudden. We see it at the same time. We collectively gasp. The yellow arches of a McDonald’s, rising up like a mirage.

  “We start sprinting, I am not kidding, we sprint to the McDonald’s. And it’s real! It’s open! We walk in! It’s almost empty, and it’s small, and there is one sad person behind the counter with the same eyes and teeth and sideways—but we don’t care! We order burgers! We order fries! We order milkshakes! And those things come! We go to this small table and we’re shoving food into our faces, we’re making these little food-sounds, these disgusting grunts and groans, we’re grotesque, we don’t care…and then we hear this girl go, ‘Oh my God.’

  “We look up. There’s a girl standing in front of us who looks like us. She’s dressed like us. Her eyes and her teeth are in the right place. She’s staring at our eyes and our teeth. She goes, ‘Who are you?’ And we tell her we’re Canadians. We say, ‘Who are you?’ and she tells us she’s British, she’s a grad student, she’s come out to this island to do her graduate studies. It’s really really hard to get to this island, so she had to plan to come here a whole year in advance, she had to get booking on this one ship that leaves from New Zealand and goes to a place where you can take a ship to another place where there’s a ship that comes here. Every six months, this one ship comes here. And two months ago, that ship came here, and she was on it. So she’s been here for two months, and she has four more left.

  “We ask her what she’s studying, and she tells us that she studies genetics, and as far as genetics go, there are things she is seeing here that she has never seen anywhere else. Because, you see, the entire island is comprised of people who are related to each other in baffling genetic configurations. This is one of the few places that has been unpolluted by the outside world—people don’t visit, people certainly don’t move here, and people don’t leave either. It’s like the mecca for inbreeding.”

  I’m sitting so still that I’m barely breathing, except when Macey passes me the cigarette and I inhale-exhale and hand it back. When Macey pauses, I ask: “So what happened?”

  “Well,” says Macey, “she asks how we got there. We tell her that we came on our own ship and it’s getting fixed. And then she just breaks down. This chick starts sobbing. She says please please please take her with us. Don’t leave her here. She can’t do it anymore. She needs to go home. She says she has never felt so alone in her life. She says the island is making her crazy. I’ve never seen anybody just come apart like that. We try to calm her down, we give her part of our hamburgers, she won’t stop crying. She says she’s eaten at McDonald’s three times a day for two months. She says if she sees another French fry she’ll slit her wrists.”

  Macey finishes the cigarette. She stubs it out. She checks the time.

  “Oh shit,” she says. “I gotta bounce.”

  “Wait!” I say, a little stunned. “Where are you going?”

  “Date,” she says. “Tinder.”

  “Oh.” I’d forgotten there was another world out there with Tinder, and other people, and Camilo. “But—what happened?”

  “Oh,” Macey says, as if it should be obvious. “We got our boat fixed and we left.”

  “But what about the British girl?”

  “It was a boat built for four, not five.”

  “You left her?” I want to sound cool, but I’m horrified.

  Macey’s brow furrows, just a little. “We didn’t have room,” she tells me, like it’s simple math. “Anyway, she had a boat coming in four months.”

  “In four months.” I don’t want to sound accusatory, but I do.

  “Listen,” says Macey. “Don’t go to a fucking island if you don’t wanna be on a fucking island. You know?”

  She stands. She’s sweaty and salty and an asshole and unspeakably beautiful. “Thanks for the iced coffee,” she says.

  “Thanks for rescuing me,” I say.

  She grins then. “I woulda made room for you,” she says. “On that fucking boat.” She bends down like she’s gonna kiss me, but instead she just wipes the sweat off my face with the back of her hand. Then she walks down the block, hips swinging. I stare after her. I am a teenage boy. I am awkward and lustful. I have been touched by a god.

  The whole rest of the day Camilo leaves me three voicemails and ten text messages and I don’t reply. I just sit on the bench, where Macey left me, and I watch the air get thicker and hotter and then thinner and cooler, as the sun starts to go down. I drink two more iced coffees. I go inside to pee five times. I think about Macey and her tiny jaws working the gum, and her shipwreck story.

  I think about the husband, the wife, their three children. All the eyes and all the teeth. I think that no wonder they don’t want outsiders coming in, who look different and want cold meat instead of room-temperature meat, or no meat at all. I think that you love and fuck and create life with the people who are in front of you, regardless of who they are, regardless of whether or not they’re the best choices, because that’s sort of an evolutionary imperative. I think there are some islands people just have no business going to visit. I think about the British girl eating McDonald’s three times a day. I think that sometimes you can’t wait four months for a boat.

  * * *

  —

  SOON AFTER, I BREAK UP with Camilo and I move to a tiny apartment in Queens. He cries, because he’s in touch with his feelings and because he rejects society’s mandate that men can’t grieve. He explains this in one of the many voicemails that he leaves for months after. The voicemails culminate in the morning I find a giant planter full of dirt on my new doorstep—a visual metaphor, I imagine, for how I’ve buried his heart. (Later, he emails to tell me that it was a visual metaphor for the rich soil of art and communication in which our relationship, had I not given up, would have flourished.)

  Late at night, I lie in my bed alone. I extend my limbs and take up space I didn’t even know I could take up. I don’t think about art. I lie very still and in the silence I think I hear something like the ocean. It could be traffic on the BQE. It could be faraway planes, taking off and landing at LaGuardia. But I close my eyes and I imagine the sound of the waves, curling around me, bearing me further and further from shore, washing me out to sea where things are different and nothing that’s coming is anything I’ve ever seen before.

  I was almost asleep when Iseya asked, “If I married you, would you stay?”

  In my half-dream, I was back in Pretoria. It was summer there and the South African sun was beating down on my skin, hot and yellow, not like the thin white sun of Japan. I was turning in slow circles, smelling the wind from each direction like a dog—and there it was, far away, the salt and mercury of the ocean.

  And then Iseya’s voice, slipping into my dream.

  I opened my eyes to the dark of the room. Outside the apartment it would be a humid Tokyo night, the sort of thick heat that had its own word: mushi-atsui. I could see that his eyes were closed, and I’d just decided that I must have dreamed his question when he asked it again, still in Japanese.

  Iseya’s English is better than my Japanese; he did a home stay in Australia as a kid, studied English literature at his Japanese university, and dated two neurotic American girls and one sociopathic Brit before he met me. I moved here three years ago and learned my Japanese the hard way, pointing at pictures and stuttering nouns. Iseya speaks English to me when he wants to talk about something without the time delay required for me to conjugate Japanese verbs in my head. But always, without fail, Iseya asks his difficult questions in Japanese. I think maybe he needs the time delay then. Two and a half years ago he
asked, in Japanese, “Will you go out with me?” Last year, in Japanese: “Will you move in with me?” And now: “If I married you, would you stay?”

  I reached out and touched the hard curve of his arm. Ran my fingertips up it to the shoulder, then across to the jut of his collarbone, to his chest. He has a tattoo there, a small one just above his heart, of an anchor. You’d never know it if you saw him on the street dressed for work. In the dark, even with his question hanging between us, Iseya smiled. He always smiles when I touch him. I dated a man for almost five years, back in Pretoria, and I can count on one hand the number of times he was happy to see me.

  “Are you asking me to marry you?” I asked in English. “Or are you just asking me to stay?”

  I flattened my hand across the anchor, over his heart. Iseya stayed still, eyes closed.

  “ ‘Just’?” he echoed, almost teasing. “Is that ‘just’?”

  I was quiet. I didn’t want to talk about this now. Not with the dream so close, salt in my mouth and the skin-memory of African sun. The dreams are fewer now than when I moved here, but when they come they still devour everything.

  He opened his eyes, then. Something in my silence. He looked at me through the darkness, then touched my cheek. “Think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU CALLED THE MOVING COMPANY,” Pieter said.

  “To get quotes. To get rates.”

  “Does Iseya know you called them?”

  I sighed. “It was just for information. I haven’t decided anything.”

  “So…he doesn’t know.” Pieter took another sip of his beer, running his long fingers up and down the glass where the condensation had gathered. “I don’t know what’s so hard,” he said. “I can’t wait to get out of here. Got my ticket home last week, never felt better.”

  I’d thought I wanted to talk about this, but I was finding that I didn’t. “So did you work things out with Hitomi?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, Pieter winced and took a long drink.

  I’d met Hitomi a few times—a pretty college girl who looked at Pieter as if he was her whole world. She’d confessed to me once, drunk, that she knew Pieter fucked other girls but that she was going to marry him. “He always comes back to me,” she’d said. “Someday I’ll be enough.”

  I’d given Pieter shit for that. “She thinks you’re Prince Charming. How can you do that to her?”

  “Listen,” Pieter had said, as if explaining simple math to a child. “This is Japan, everybody fucks around. If you do not discuss, it is not happening. Hitomi is a great girl, but tonight she’s drunk, and she knows the things she doesn’t know. Tomorrow she’ll be sober, and she won’t know them again.”

  I’d looked at Pieter, the half-smile on his face, sharp jaw and long nose and sea-gray eyes, and I’d thought: Japanese girls love these guys. They love them and get betrayed by them again and again. And these boys, who could never get away with this shit in their own countries, get away with it here because their skin and hair and eyes are different, and being different has made them gods.

  “You’re a prick,” I’d told Pieter. “If I were Hitomi I’d have left you months ago.”

  “You’d never be Hitomi,” Pieter had said. “And we would never date.”

  * * *

  —

  I WAS BROUGHT BACK BY the solid impact of an empty beer mug on the wood table. Pieter had drained it to the bottom, and he was signaling for another.

  “That bad,” I said, impressed.

  “She’s pregnant.” Pieter took a drink from mine next.

  “Did you break up with her before or after you found out?”

  “Before, obviously,” Pieter said, suddenly irritated. “I’m not a total asshole.”

  “Is she lying, then?”

  “No. She’s not smart enough.”

  “Are you back together?”

  “No.”

  “Is she getting an abortion?”

  “No.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  Hunched over the table, his hair bright under the lights and his eyes sharp, Pieter reminded me of the birds at the Ueno Zoo—too much wing and not enough space. A realization struck me. “You’re still going back.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re just leaving her here?”

  “I’ll figure something out when I’m home.”

  “When you’re home she’ll be half a world away,” I said. “How are you going to figure anything out from there? By Skype?”

  “I don’t know!” he said, loud enough for the bartender to glance at us. “How the fuck do I know?” Then quieter: “I’m going mad here. Think about it, you love Iseya and even you can’t stay.”

  “I didn’t say that!” I objected, feeling unfairly trapped. “I haven’t decided that!”

  Pieter laughed, but it had an edge to it. “Americans can stay here, Daniela. Brits can stay here. But for us, after home, everywhere else is too soft and clean. You start getting soft and clean too and you can’t live with that.”

  I stared at Pieter, amazed. I’d never heard him talk like this about anything. He drifted his way through Japan, teaching English by day, partying by night as we all did. He was always leaning against some wall, always lighting somebody’s cigarette, his face arranged with a twist of a smile.

  Pieter saw me staring at him, but he didn’t look away.

  “You know it just as well as I do,” he said. “And your boy does too.”

  * * *

  —

  PIETER AND I WEREN’T FRIENDS the way other people are friends. We were just South Africans. Even though he was from the Afrikaner side of things, and I was prep-school English, we had the same dirt under our fingernails, the same dust and salt in our blood. We’d both bought similar drugs in Johannesburg and driven, although at different times and without knowing each other, to Cape Town to party. We’d gone to the same university in Pretoria—but two years apart, and our paths had never intersected. Here in Japan, whether or not we liked each other was immaterial: we were, in some bizarre way, family.

  Iseya didn’t like Pieter, although he’d never said so. He’d met Pieter on any number of occasions—at Friday-night gatherings in the apartment building everyone called the Gaijin Ghetto, at bars in Shinjuku or Shibuya. He’d been polite each time, speaking in English so that Pieter wouldn’t feel left out, asking Pieter how his job was. But the warmth that had attracted me from the first, the glow that seemed to emanate from Iseya like heat, was noticeably absent.

  I asked Iseya about it, just once, when we were alone at his apartment.

  “Why don’t you like Pieter?”

  “I don’t dislike him,” Iseya said with diplomacy.

  I ignored that. “I know you aren’t jealous of him. So what is it? You just think he’s an asshole? Or what?”

  Iseya had been washing the dishes while I dried them. Now he was quiet. He hated moments in which we might clash. I could count the number of fights we’d had on one hand, and each one of them had been ended by Iseya’s refusal to fight anymore, Iseya leaving the apartment and returning later when I was calm.

  At last Iseya asked, carefully, “Why do you like him?”

  I hadn’t expected that. “Come on. I asked you first.”

  “You answer, and then I will.”

  “Fine.” I snapped the dish towel at Iseya’s leg but deliberately missed. “He’s funny. He makes me laugh. He doesn’t say no. The Americans are always, ‘I’m tired, it costs too much, I’ll miss the last train,’ but Pieter’s just…ready for whatever.” I considered. “And he’s from the same place as me. He knows the things about me that I know about him. Yeah? Your turn.”

  Iseya nodded, not dismissing what I’d said, but acknowledg
ing it. “You didn’t say he’s nice,” he observed.

  “What?”

  “Nice. You didn’t say that. Generous, kind. You didn’t say those things.”

  “No,” I said, a little uneasily. “I guess not.”

  “And that is why I do not like him,” Iseya had said, and went back to washing dishes.

  * * *

  —

  I HAD COME TO JAPAN assuming that I would leave. But the money was incredible. One month in the Cape Town food factory where I worked after university didn’t earn half as much as a single week here. And Japan was clean. Pieter had been right about that. It was clean and safe, and as I walked back to the apartment at night, I never forgot that.

  I started buying and wearing short skirts, the ones I could never get away with back home. Only Pieter had understood the gesture. Some skinny Brit had seen me in my first short skirt and said, “Sexy.” Pieter had run his eyes up and down my legs and said, “Enjoy.” I’d tried to explain to Iseya later: “If I wore this skirt at home, I’d get raped. And what’s more, everyone would tell me I’d been asking for it.” Iseya had nodded, but he hadn’t understood. Not really. But Pieter had followed the same elections I had, and when Zuma was elected president despite being embroiled in a rape trial, Pieter had been the one who spent a night getting mournfully drunk with me in an izakaya.

  Iseya would often scold me for not locking the apartment door, or for walking alone at three or four in the morning. “Japan is not so safe as you think,” he’d say. But I would think of my first apartment in Jo-burg, the one I had locked and double-locked and triple-locked, that had been broken into on six separate occasions. I would think of my friends’ mothers getting mugged in their own backyards, the one who got gang-raped at a bus stop. I would think of the beautiful war zone that was my country, and I’d pat Iseya’s arm and say the phrase he most hated to hear from me: “Don’t worry about it.”