The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  He stepped back. “I don’t want to see anything happen to you, Sylvia.”

  “I know,” I said. “Of course not.”

  He touched my neck, his fingers pressing into the little dip at the base, before walking down the hall and disappearing behind a door. When I went downstairs, into the blistering light, the ceiling was raining silver confetti.

  * * *

  At Sylvia’s apartment, I took the cordless phone onto the balcony and called her hotel. The front desk transferred me to her room and when she didn’t answer, I left a message. I told her about the gray-suited man, that she was supposed to have something for him, that some kind of meeting had been arranged. I said she had to tell me what was going on, that this wasn’t the kind of thing I could pretend my way through. I said she was wrong about what she’d told me earlier, that I hadn’t agreed to this because I wanted to know what it was like to be her. Couldn’t you see, I said, that I just wanted to get out of my life?

  The sky was black, the horizon electric. I heard the distant whoosh of the ocean. Even at night, the heat was crushing. I leaned over the railing and stared at the sidewalk. Cars lined the street; people drifted up and down the concrete strip. I tried to imagine Sylvia flinging herself over the iron barrier and dropping through the air like a meteor. Her apartment was only on the third floor. Thick hedges bordered the sidewalk; the lawn was green and soft. Certainly it was possible for someone to jump off the balcony and survive. I wondered what those first waking moments, on the grass or in the hedges, might have been like for Sylvia. I wondered, as I lived my own unhappy life hundreds of miles away, if any of those sudden, inexplicable pains—the ache in the belly, the cramp in the knee—was some primitive part of my brain registering that my other half was in peril.

  I went into the living room and dialed my husband’s number. We hadn’t spoken since I phoned to say I was extending my stay in Miami. But, I realized as the phone rang, I didn’t have to be the person calling him now.

  “Mark,” I said when he answered, adopting my sister’s higher pitch. “It’s Sylvia.”

  “How’s the weather?” he asked. “The storm?”

  “It’s passed.”

  “And my wife?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “A bit difficult at times.”

  He paused. I thought I heard a door close. “Sylvia would never say ‘a bit difficult.’ She would say ‘she’s a pain in the ass’ or ‘she’s fucked in the head.’ She wouldn’t be delicate about it.”

  “You got me.” My voice slipped back to its usual tone. I lay on the floor, my legs stretching underneath the coffee table.

  “Why would you pretend to be Sylvia?” he asked. “After all you’ve been through with her?”

  “You mean after all we’ve been through with her.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  I nestled the phone between my chin and shoulder. “Soon. When Sylvia is done needing me.”

  “Since when do you care about Sylvia needing you?” he said. “I don’t understand why you went down there in the first place, let alone why you’re staying.”

  “Since when do you have conversations with my sister without telling me?”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “How would you know what I think?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Let’s not let this go the way it always goes.”

  I picked at the wax drippings that had solidified on the carpet. “When I get back, are we going to take that trip or what?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll do it.”

  “You really want to?”

  “I really do.”

  “Sylvia said you weren’t sure.”

  “Sometimes we get frustrated. Sometimes we say things we don’t mean.” He sighed. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “So much,” I said. “There’s so much more you could tell me.”

  “I’ve decided I want to go away with you,” he said. “Can’t we just leave it at that?”

  “That’s been our whole problem. Deciding to leave things at that.”

  “You’re making it impossible to talk.”

  “Fine. Where will we go? Tell me.” I listened to his breath on the line.

  “One summer, when I was in college, I visited a Tibetan monastery,” he said. “It was just outside of Lhasa. I sat in silence with the monks for three days. We could do something like that, something spiritual.”

  I already knew about this trip. He’d taken it in the company of his former girlfriend, whom he’d come close to marrying, but I didn’t bring that up. His voice reminded me of who I really was, of the deepness of my—our—unhappiness. When you’re married, our counselor had told us, happiness is like a joint banking account; it becomes full or depleted in tandem.

  “I was thinking an island might be nice,” I said.

  “I hate to swim. You know that about me.”

  I rested the phone against my chest. My husband started talking about practical things, how long we could afford to stay away, whether or not we should use a travel agent or buy insurance. His voice passed over me like wind.

  3.

  The next morning, when I went into the kitchen to make coffee, I found two men sitting on the living room sofa. They stood and introduced themselves as A2 and B2. They were broad-shouldered and bald. They both had round faces and squinty eyes. They wore black T-shirts and black slacks and boots. They told me that my name was no longer Sylvia Collins. To them, I was only the mark: C2.

  I hadn’t done my makeup or hair or put on the lip ring. I was naked underneath my sister’s silk bathrobe. I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “What’s with the names?” I said.

  “It’s the Pythagorean theorem,” A said. “We used to be mathematicians.”

  “You missed your meeting this morning,” B said, stepping closer to me. “You told Andre you’d be there and you weren’t. So we’ve been sent to keep an eye on you, to make sure you’re getting things in order, like you’ve told people you would.”

  “And to make sure you don’t split,” A said.

  I sat on the floor. My bathrobe gaped open. The whole picture was coming into focus, a blur in my periphery gradually taking shape, like when your sight starts recovering after getting eyedrops at the doctor’s office. I pressed my legs together. I felt like I was sinking into the floor.

  “This is a complicated situation,” I said.

  “Everyone tells us that,” A said.

  “Sylvia isn’t here right now. I mean, I’m not actually Sylvia.”

  “Everyone tells us that, too,” B said.

  I asked about making a call. The men shrugged. I dialed my sister’s hotel room and got the machine again. I told her that two men were in her apartment and she needed to take the next flight home. After hanging up, I turned to A and B, who were unimpressed.

  “Listen,” A said. “Nothing is going to happen to you. Not yet. It’s too soon for that sort of thing, we’ve been told.”

  “Just do what you’ve promised to do,” B said.

  “I didn’t promise anything,” I told them. “I’m not Sylvia.”

  “Whatever,” they said.

  * * *

  I made coffee and got dressed, taking the first thing I saw in the drawer: jean shorts and a red tube top. In the bathroom, I styled my bangs and did the makeup basics—lipstick, mascara, blush—and put on the lip ring. When I came back into the kitchen, A and B had emptied the coffeepot. They took up too much space in the apartment. I needed to get out.

  I drove to Coco’s with A and B in the backseat. Before leaving, I’d taken one of Sylvia’s pills, and when they realized what I was up to in the bathroom, they’d demanded a dose of their own. These kinds of jobs have their perks, A had said, knocking his back without any water. In the car, they squabbled over radio stations.

  “Are all people in your profession like this?” I asked.

  “Like what?” they said.

  We pass
ed high-rises and surf shops, snow-cone vendors and hot-dog stands. There was little sign of the storm by then, just the occasional ripped billboard or bare palm tree. In the rearview, I saw the Lincoln behind us. I rolled down the window and waved.

  “Who are you waving to?” A wanted to know.

  “No one,” I said.

  “Is this a convertible?” B asked.

  I nodded.

  “Put down the top,” he said.

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  A leaned over the console. His cologne reminded me of what my father used to wear. He had a silver stud in his ear. I felt his breath on my neck.

  “Who gives a fuck what you feel like?” he said.

  I put the top down. Wind raked through my hair. The breeze felt good. At a red light, I took my hands off the wheel and thrust my arms into the open air.

  * * *

  At Coco’s, A and B took a table in the corner and waited. The window was still boarded up. The boy behind the counter had a black eye. Ants crawled beneath the plastic dome covering a lemon meringue pie. While I was in line, the woman came in and took the same booth. She wore her sunglasses. A little orange scarf was tied around her neck. I got my coffee and joined her. This time, I kept my sunglasses off.

  I touched the boards covering the window. “I wonder how much longer these will be here.”

  “Who knows,” she said. “We’re used to seeing the mark of storms.”

  “Don’t you want something to eat?” I asked. “Something to drink?”

  She shook her head. I asked what she knew about the Isle of Youth.

  “Many years ago, I went there with my husband,” she said. “It was full of marshes and huge insects. The houses and hotels were falling in. It was anything but a paradise.”

  “I don’t know your husband, but he isn’t on a business trip, like he said.”

  She took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were a dull blue. “What are you talking about?”

  I looked past the woman, at A and B, who were huddled together at their table, watching. “I’m not sure how to explain this,” I began, and then I told her everything. That it was my sister, Sylvia, and not me, her twin, having the affair, that I was just filling in while they had one last hurrah. And now, thanks to my sister’s involvement in God-knows-what, I was being followed by two men who wouldn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t her.

  The woman cupped a hand over her eyes. “My husband hasn’t left town, on business or otherwise, since April.”

  “What?”

  “He lost his job,” she said. “I thought you knew about that.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “This morning. I watched him do a crossword puzzle. He kept asking if I knew a synonym for ‘flummoxed.’”

  “You mean he’s home? Right now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Right now.”

  On the radio, I caught the end of one of the songs Sylvia had played for me and claimed as her own. My cheeks tingled. I leaned back in the booth and tried to picture my next step.

  “Why do you even believe me?” I asked. “I mean, how do you know I’m not Sylvia?”

  “You walk like you’re not sure where you want to go. You’re nervous, unsure. Your sister acts like she has nothing but ice inside her.”

  I felt relieved that there might be a way to tell us apart after all.

  “Why would you do this for someone?” the woman asked. “Why would you agree to take over her life?”

  I considered telling her that I had wanted to help my sister, that I had wanted us to reconnect, even though that wasn’t it at all. I had always thought of Sylvia as being free—of responsibility, of decency, of career and home, of building the things you’re supposed to build, the things that everyone says are so important.

  “I wanted to feel free,” I said.

  “I don’t know why I’ve done what I’ve done.” The woman shook her head. “Why I didn’t just leave.”

  “I could say the same thing.”

  “Where are these men?” She leaned toward me. “The ones who are following you.”

  “Sitting behind you.”

  She nodded, but didn’t look over her shoulder. I admired her restraint.

  “What are you going to do about them? Should you call the police?”

  “I don’t think it works that way.” I stood up. I had the number for Sylvia’s hotel in my purse. I looked down at the woman, then over at A and B. The only time my husband ever followed me was on our second wedding anniversary. He waited outside the library and trailed me to the park where I usually ate lunch. I was unwrapping a tuna sandwich when he appeared from behind a tree, holding a white box with a cake inside. Flash forward five years, and he’d stopped chasing after me when I stormed out during our fights. As I looked at the three faces of my followers, I was hit with something almost like desire.

  I headed for the door. The men followed. The woman did not.

  * * *

  I went to a pay phone down the street, A and B in pursuit. I fished some quarters from my purse and dialed Sylvia’s number. She answered after one ring.

  “Hello,” I said. “It’s me.” The sky was bright. I put on the sunglasses.

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought you were going to be someone else.”

  “So here’s what I know: your lover is home, in Miami, and you’re in deep shit. Two men have been sent to keep an eye on you because you missed some kind of meeting.” A was leaning against a telephone pole. B was rolling a little gray rock around on the sidewalk with the toe of his boot.

  “I needed you.” She was quiet for a moment. “You wouldn’t have agreed to fill in for me if you knew what I was really doing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Correcting a supply problem.”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “A and B are harmless. They’re never sent to do the dirty work.”

  “This is more than I can handle,” I said. “This is more than I agreed to. Are you even on the Isle of Youth?”

  “That part’s true,” she said. “But it’s not what I thought it would be like. It’s dirty and run-down.”

  “This trip hasn’t been what I thought it would be like either,” I said. “Not even close.”

  “I’m still coming back when I promised,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the apartment tomorrow night. Everything will get straightened out then.”

  “As soon as you walk through the door, I’m gone.”

  “You don’t care about what happens to me?”

  “You said everything would get straightened out.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to be sure?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Change of subject. What’s my life like these days?”

  “Lonely,” I said. “Very lonely.”

  “Tomorrow night.” She inhaled sharply, as though she was about to say something else, then hung up the phone.

  “See?” I said, turning to the men. “I’m not Sylvia. I’m her sister. I was just talking to Sylvia on the phone.”

  “Bravo,” A said.

  “Nice show.” B applauded.

  “You two should have stuck with math,” I said as we walked back to the car.

  * * *

  I drove around downtown Miami in a daze. The sky was clear; it was hard to believe a hurricane had blown through only a few days before. We kept the top down. A and B were bickering over the radio again. They finally agreed on NPR.

  “We like The Infinite Mind,” B told me. This week’s program featured a woman who, after brain surgery, woke up believing she was a nineteenth-century monk. Formerly a fifth-grade English teacher, the woman now recited details of her ascent through the order and her life in the monastery, all of which checked out with religious scholars. Soon her speech and motor skills began to decline, and the last word she spoke was megaloschemos, Greek for “great schema,” a term used for a monk who had reached the highest level of spiritual enlightenment.
r />   After the program ended, B said the story illustrated how speech is an inauthentic form of communication.

  “Think about it,” he said. “She reached, symbolically speaking, the highest level of enlightenment just before she stopped talking.”

  A countered that it was a commentary on inborn knowledge, on how we hold inside ourselves ideas and experiences that exist on a plane far above our conscious minds.

  “For example,” he said, “the first time someone asked me to take a gun apart and put it back together, I did it automatically, even though I’d never been taught how. I’d been holding this knowledge inside me without knowing it.”

  “Maybe it’s a commentary on how badly this woman’s surgeon fucked up,” I said.

  “That’s just cynicism,” A said. “That’s too easy, too shallow.”

  “To look away from mystery is to look away from life itself,” B added.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Why are you talking like that?”

  “It’s what distinguishes us in our profession,” B said. “Our thoughtfulness.”

  We passed kids riding low-slung bicycles and a bus full of nuns. I wondered what kind of inborn knowledge I might have inside me. I imagined a silver spiral sitting in my chest, waiting to be utilized. I had just turned onto Eleventh Street when the men began to criticize my driving.

  “You’re just driving around the same blocks,” B said. “You should be getting it together, sorting things out.”

  “I don’t know where to go,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Figure something out,” A said. “We’re getting bored back here.”

  I steered the car toward the one place I knew my sister stayed away from.

  * * *

  Sylvia never liked water. When we were twelve, our parents took us on a trip to Carmel. At night, in our resort room with dolphin-printed wallpaper, my sister was kept awake by nightmares about being swept out to sea. I had enjoyed the trip because it was one of the few times I was better at something; I swam with abandon, ducking underwater and holding my breath until I felt my lungs would burst.

  After parking the Mazda on the edge of Miami Beach, I took off my sandals. A and B lumbered along behind me. The beach was a great sweep of cerulean water and white sand; when I looked into the distance, I saw the peaks of boats. Striped umbrellas jutted from the ground. Yellow and lavender lifeguard towers dotted the shore. Girls lay facedown in the sand, their bronzed backs and legs gleaming. Since leaving Coco’s, there had been no sign of the woman and her beige Lincoln.