The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  Agnes doesn’t think she’s dying. Agnes thinks people are watching her, and who knows, they might be. The thing about paranoia in the twenty-first century is that, at some point, it’s impossible to know if you’re crazy, or if you’re astute. Everywhere you go there are tiny screens pointed at you like eyes. Every dressing room, every café, every tourist with an iPhone taking photos that implicate you in the background. Every surface is multiplied and reflected, all sight has been turned into fly-sight and bee-sight: triplicate, quadruplicate, hexagonal and multiplying. Are they watching you, or are you just being seen?

  Agnes goes on these spirals where she googles things like “NSA” and “Area 51” and “Surveillance” and “How normal people get hauled away to internment camps.” I know whenever she’s been on a bender because she shows up to meet me with dark circles under her eyes and hasn’t yet been to yoga.

  “I don’t know why you aren’t more worried,” says Agnes. We sit in a corner, and she holds her still-rolled yoga mat between herself and everything else, like a barrier. “The world is fucked, Sammy.”

  “I’m worried,” I say. I’m not sure how to tell Agnes about the brain cancer.

  “I bet you didn’t know this,” Agnes says, “but…” She goes on for a long time, and I listen for the sound of my brain tumor growing. This morning the headache was still there, and the center of my head felt oddly heavier, like there was something malignant nestled inside. Sometimes I don’t know how people get up in the morning and make their coffee and go to work, when we live in bodies that are ticking time bombs. Sometimes I don’t know how I do these things, and then I want to stop, I just want to stop doing anything at all, and wait for the time bomb to explode.

  Agnes finishes, and studies my face to see how I’ll react to what was clearly a terrible revelation.

  “That’s terrible,” I say.

  Agnes sighs. “I know,” she says.

  We sit together, in a moment of silence.

  “I mean,” Agnes says after the moment of silence has passed, “basically we should go off the grid.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Where?”

  “The problem is that there’s no place left that’s off the grid.” Agnes chews her lower lip. “Not in the U.S. anyway, your phone records all of your coordinates all the time, your camera is basically another portal through which you can be observed, and satellites pass over every inch of everything. You used to live in Japan, what do you think?”

  “Definitely cameras everywhere,” I say. Agnes chews harder at her lip. “South America,” I suggest. “The Andes mountains.”

  Agnes considers this. We have had versions of this conversation often. It was the first conversation of our friendship, several years ago at the AA women’s group. I’d just returned from Japan, arriving in New York to realize that I had no idea what I was doing with my life other than acquiring and nourishing a drinking problem. Agnes sat down next to me on a rickety folding chair, Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, and asked, “Is there anywhere left that’s off the grid?” And I looked at her—gangly, intense, vital with unease—and I knew we’d be friends. “The Andes,” I said, and she smiled.

  Since then, Agnes has reconsidered the Andes. She feels differently about them, depending on the day. Sometimes they seem like a safe haven. Sometimes it seems inconceivable that someone hasn’t gotten to them yet: “By now, even the Andes are bugged.”

  Today she’s in a more hopeful mood. “The Andes are a possibility,” she says.

  I wonder if now is the moment to tell her that I’m not certain I’ll be alive too much longer. I wonder when I should give this information to Oliver. Yesterday Oliver left me three voicemails in fifteen minutes. The first said: “I miss you, are you coming over?” The second said: “Can you bring latex gloves and some more paper towel?” The third said: “Why aren’t you picking up, are we okay?” I know he means am I breaking up with him—this is a question that Oliver puzzles over, obsesses over—but the answer might be one he didn’t expect. Namely: yes, but brain cancer.

  Agnes eyes me over her coffee. “Someone is watching us have this conversation,” she says. “Right now? Right this second? Someone somewhere is watching us talk to each other.”

  We take a moment and dart our eyes around the café. There’s a tiny little camera tucked like a bat, sleeping in the far juncture of wall and wall. Last night Oliver buried his face in the juncture of my neck and shoulder and said: “I love you.” And then he said, “You don’t have to say it back,” but it sounded like an accusation.

  “Why?” I ask. “What does it tell them, to watch us have coffee?”

  Agnes sighs. “If one of us becomes a Dissident Element,” she says, “they’ll know we know each other and then they’ll pick the other of us up off the street, probably in a black unmarked van, and they’ll take us somewhere. They’re information-gathering.”

  This morning Oliver called to ask if we could go on vacation together in July. I wanted to know if Agnes could come, to which he replied, “But if Agnes comes, then we won’t be together.” He asked, “Why would you want Agnes to come on our romantic vacation?” He was information-gathering.

  “All information they possess will ultimately be used against you,” Agnes warns. “They even tell us that straight up, but nobody really believes it.”

  * * *

  —

  I WANT TO TELL OLIVER that I might be dying, but Oliver wants to tell me something first. I smell a terrible stench before I even get all the way in the door. “Temporary,” he’s saying, “just for the week,” and as my face screws itself up, I come to a halt in front of a giant iguana sitting on his counter. Its cage is open. Its tail is draped across the fruit bowl. I make a mental note to never eat that fruit. The iguana tilts its jagged face to one side and sizes me up, in a singularly hostile manner.

  “Izaiah,” says Oliver.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Izaiah the Iguana.”

  Izaiah and I stare at each other. I think: botulism. I think: salmonella. I think people have actually died from salmonella, like people with compromised immune systems, like people with inoperable brain cancers. Oliver is excited. He’s moving back and forth from foot to foot the way he does when he’s overstimulated. With his shirt hiked up and his cargo pants falling down, Oliver looks a little bit like a hyper-caffeinated eight-year-old, and not like someone who is turning thirty.

  “Oliver,” I say, “why are you babysitting an iguana?”

  Oliver doesn’t understand the question. I try again: “Where did it come from?”

  “Oh!” Oliver says. “He belongs to the guys downstairs, but they went to Boston for the week so I said I’d take him.”

  “Oh,” I say, as if this explains things, but it doesn’t—in large part because my question isn’t really Where did it come from? but rather Why did you think you were the person to look after it? Oliver is not organized. He’s not responsible. I have known him to eat cat food, because he was buying groceries in a hurry and thought he was getting canned tuna fish. Oliver is impetuous, moved by the spirit of whatever moment he is in. Sometimes he feels like smudging the apartment with palo santo. But then he remembers that yesterday he dropped fifty cents behind the bed, so he puts the palo santo down on the counter and goes into the bedroom, but there’s mail on the counter, so he lights all the mail on fire. Head shoved under the bed, searching for quarters while the fire alarm starts to shriek: this is Oliver.

  When we first met, I found him charming and disarming. I had dropped my phone onto the subway tracks and was trying to calculate my chances of being hit by a train if I went after it. Oliver flung himself past me, down onto the tracks, grabbed my phone, and vaulted back up. I blinked at him, he grinned at me, brown eyes radiating enthusiasm. “I think I touched a rat,” he said, and I felt myself instantly drawn in. I am a person who thinks too much, and all of m
y thoughts instantaneously transform themselves into worries. Oliver’s desperate impetuousness seemed like an open door, a blinking EXIT sign, a THIS WAY arrow that might lead me out of myself to safety. Instead, it has led me to an iguana.

  “Do you want to pat him?” Oliver asks.

  Izaiah looks at me like: Just try it, bitch.

  “Nah,” I say, “I’m good.”

  “I invited people over to watch him,” Oliver says. He’s still jiggling from foot to foot, but less so because he can tell that I don’t love Izaiah, and this makes him nervous. Oliver gets upset when we feel different things at the same time, or the same things at different times. He calls this “misalignment,” and he says it just makes him very very sad, but sometimes it’s the sort of sad where he ends up yelling.

  “Watch him, like, you’re going out?”

  “No, watch him. We’re going to sit here and watch him. He’s really primal and instinctual and just…natural.”

  “Oh,” I say. In my head I wonder if it’s time to mention the brain tumor yet. Like: I don’t have time to sit here all night and stare at this iguana, because my time on earth is limited.

  “I don’t know how many people are coming though,” Oliver says. “I just sort of made a Facebook group and invited everybody.”

  “That’s why I asked you to get rubber gloves,” Oliver says, “and paper towel.”

  “I guess you forgot,” Oliver says, and his eyes finish the sentence with about me.

  I make the decision not to mention my brain tumor.

  * * *

  —

  FOUR PEOPLE COME OVER TO stare at the iguana. One of them is Oliver’s ex-roommate, an activist named Sofia. She comes directly from a protest, and leaves her placard in the hallway with the shoes. One of them is Oliver’s best friend Mason, who has started growing his hair long because Oliver’s is long. He is a little bit in love with Oliver, and he thinks Oliver’s ideas are generally all good ideas, even when they haven’t finished forming. One of them is Mason’s recent ex-girlfriend, who comes in large part to punish Mason. She sits directly across the iguana from Mason, and her stony stare could be trained on either him or Izaiah—it’s hard to tell. The fourth person is Agnes, who comes because I text her, HELP.

  Agnes and I stand in the kitchen and confer in low voices, as everybody else sits around the living room in a ragged circle and stares at Izaiah. Oliver is staring so hard that he’s top-heavy, leaning forward with his lower lip protruding. His attention is a weight—I know because I’ve felt it.

  “Are they high?” Agnes wants to know.

  I say I don’t think so, although it’s hard to tell sometimes.

  “Is the lizard doing anything?”

  I risk a glance around the doorframe. In the past half hour, Izaiah has moved from the counter to the top of the microwave, where he now sits majestically.

  “Not really.”

  “It’s super weird,” Agnes says, also risking a glance. She finds it hard to approve of Oliver. Oliver finds it hard to be disapproved of.

  “I know,” I say. “I mean who would want to own a fucking iguana?”

  “You could put a chip in it,” Agnes muses.

  “You mean like with dogs, like if it gets lost?”

  “No,” Agnes says, lowering her voice even more. “Like surveillance.”

  “Like, the CIA?”

  She shrugs. “If you wanted access to normal American homes, if you wanted access to everything that was said or…I mean the pets. Right? American pets.”

  Oliver chooses this moment to come into the kitchen for water. “Oh hi, Agnes,” he says.

  “Oh,” Agnes says, and makes him wait several more seconds before she says, “hi.”

  Oliver licks his lips a little nervously. “Are you joining us?” he asks me.

  “Yeah,” I say, “in just a minute.”

  “Okay, because that would be really great.” Oliver looks just to the left of Agnes’s left ear. “You could join us too,” he says, as if she might be too shy without an invitation.

  “Oh,” Agnes says, “no. Thanks.”

  “Oh,” Oliver says, and shifts from foot to foot for a moment, his eyes darting between Agnes and me. The silence is the sound of something continuing to disintegrate. Then: “Well. Okay.” Water glass in hand, he goes back into the living room. I always get the feeling that Agnes and Oliver are locked in a silent deadly contest, but I couldn’t tell you what the prize is.

  As soon as Oliver has retreated, Agnes turns back to me. Before she can say anything cutting and specifically aimed at him, I blurt out: “I have a brain tumor.”

  Agnes considers this. Then she asks, “Do you want to do the pat-down?”

  This is something Agnes and I have come up with. Or Agnes, mostly, has come up with it.

  I say, “Right now?” glancing toward the cabal of Facebook Iguana Watchers.

  Agnes says, “They’re staring at a fucking lizard.”

  I say, “Okay, yeah.” Because I do want to do the pat-down. I need a medical opinion, even if it isn’t expert, or even somewhat informed, or even belonging to someone who has a right to have medical opinions. The thing about Agnes is that she’s very confident, and I’m a sucker for confidence. When you sound like you know what you’re saying, I feel a huge relief fill my entire body. This is because I so rarely feel confident about anything.

  “Okay,” says Agnes, and I lift my arms above my head. Agnes’s hands move down me from scalp to forehead to throat to shoulders. They make a brisk patting gesture, as she goes through the checklist.

  “Fevers?”

  “No.”

  “Difficulty swallowing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Bloody vomit?”

  “No.”

  “Bloody shits?”

  “No.”

  Agnes is at my hips now. Her little hands do a pat-pat as she says, “Pregnant?”

  “Ew, no.”

  At my knees she says, “Night terrors?”

  “No.”

  She pat-pats the top of my Chucks, symbolically. “Yeah, you’re alive.”

  “But am I fine?”

  “You’re definitely not fine,” says Agnes, with confidence, “but I have no reason to believe you’re dying.” This time, as she straightens back up, she pat-pats the center of my forehead.

  “No brain tumor,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  OLIVER CALLS ME TO TELL me of Izaiah’s death, shortly after I’ve discovered that one of my breasts is larger than the other. This, to me, is a clear sign of breast cancer. And if not breast cancer, then a dangerous malformation that signifies bad genes, reckless mutations in my gene pool, DNA strands swapping and slipping around each other until the next kid down the line could just as easily be a frog or a rabbit.

  “Izaiah is dead,” Oliver says. He sounds very grave. I think he’s been crying.

  “Was it cancer?” I ask. I’m standing naked in my bathroom, fresh out of the shower. Pools of water are gathering around me as I squeeze my left tit, then my right, then my left again. The right one is the larger one. Is it also warmer to the touch?

  “No,” Oliver says, startled. “No, he fell out the window and died.”

  “What was he doing near a window?”

  Oliver sounds a little slippery when he says, “He was just sitting in the window.”

  “Did you put him in the window?”

  “I thought he might want to see.” Oliver is sulking now. “I thought he might want fresh air.”

  I think my right breast is warmer than my left. What generates heat? Infection generates heat. What if, instead of a cancer, I just have a giant infection in my right breast? Like the kind that travels up to your brain and kills you. What do they call that? Meningitis?<
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  “Are you still there?” Oliver demands.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m here.”

  “I can’t believe he’s dead,” says Oliver. “I was only just getting to know him.”

  Breast-related brain meningitis? Is that a thing? I want to google it, but I’m scared to google it.

  “Screens,” I say. “You should get screens for the windows.”

  “I think we should have a funeral,” Oliver says. “After I tell the guys downstairs. Maybe we can have it when they’re back from Boston. Maybe it could be nice.”

  “Maybe you should get them another lizard.”

  “Maybe we can bury him in the garden,” Oliver says, a little dreamily, ignoring me. I can tell he’s already coming up with a funeral-themed craft project. Oliver likes craft projects. And sure enough: “Maybe I could build a wooden wall, like full of candles, and everybody could light one candle for Izaiah, and say a wish, like a hope or intention in their own lives, and they could dedicate that intention to Izaiah.”

  I know what Oliver’s intention would be: that nobody ever leaves him, not neighbors, not girlfriends, not lizards. I know what my intention would be: to die so quickly, so casually, that I don’t even notice I’m dead.

  Less than thirty hours later, while Izaiah is still in the freezer waiting for his funeral, Oliver texts me to let me know that he’s agreed to babysit a pet rat. “Its name is Wallace,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  AGNES WATCHES THE EDWARD SNOWDEN documentary, and comes over. She doesn’t call first, in case our phones are being tapped. She brings a roll of black electrical tape with her, and she tapes over the camera on my laptop, and also the one on my phone. “Just in case,” she says. She’s calm but determined. I wish things that galvanized me into action also made me calm but determined. Mostly, they just make me panic.