Terminal Island

by Walter Greatshell

  He had just opened his fly and started to go when he sensed movement in his periphery: a blob of bright color. His pee stream cut off like a snipped string and he stuffed himself back in his pants, jerking his head around to see.

  But he already knew—some part of him had been expecting it.

  It was them. All of them, forming a semicircle around him, with Lisa at the center. Henry was surrounded by lollipop-colored girls, with no way to escape except over the edge of the landing: a twenty-foot drop to the sea, into water that was deep and clear and freezing cold. He could see Garibaldi perch like bright orange flames in the depths.

  In the face of having his worst nightmare realized, Henry was unexpectedly devoid of terror. Years later he would wonder if it was the primordial survival reflex of the cornered animal, something deep in the organism realizing it was too late for fear, too far gone for flight. Or perhaps he was simply relieved to face the demons that had haunted him all these days and nights. The weariness of it. Whatever, he was suddenly almost amused; a fascinated bystander at his own execution.

  “Now wait a second,” he said, instinctively holding up his hands as he had seen cops do on television when they were trying to calm desperate criminals. For this was as unreal as anything on TV—more so. “Stop playing around. This has gone far enough. You’re gonna get in trouble. I mean it.” His voice sounded high and brittle, foil-thin.

  The girls weren’t hearing him. As at the playground, they stared at Henry with the erotic malevolence of carnivores, practically licking their lips. Their shiny plastic raincoats crackled as they moved. And now Henry noticed there was something odd about the way they were holding their closed umbrellas, gripping them two-handed as if they were baseball bats. Even odder were the umbrellas themselves: As Henry watched in disbelief, the girls gloatingly peeled off their colorful fabric sheaths to reveal sharp little swords.

  Advancing on him, Lisa said, “Dibs on his heart.”

  Henry jumped off the wharf.

  There was a brief instant of heart-in-mouth falling, then he plunged deep into salty icewater. It went up his nose, flooded all his senses and his clothes, and Henry clawed his way back to the surface like a man trying to escape from a grave in which he has been buried alive.

  He came up in shadow, in the darkness beneath the landing. It was loud under there with the slopping of waves, and rough—he was being lifted and dunked and dragged back and forth. Trying to get a breath, he inhaled water and was banged hard against a barnacled concrete piling—only his clothes saved him from being too badly gashed. He knew that if he didn’t get out of there, he would soon be ground to a pulp against the pilings or the rocks. There were also the threats he couldn’t see: snarls of lost fishing-line and rusty hooks, venomous black sea-urchins, moray eels, and God knew what else lurking in the abyss below his flailing legs. Sharks.

  Above him, Henry caught watery-eyed glimpses of the girls atop the metal grating—some on hands and knees, peering down. Snippets of their shrill babble filtered through to him: “Keep looking!” “I am!” He could see them silhouetted against the sky, but he knew from standing up there that it was much harder for them to see him. As long as he didn’t reveal himself or make a sound, they might give up and go away. But if he stayed under there much longer he would be dead—the first really big wave would smash him like a bug.

  It was so cold he could barely think, but Henry decided his only chance was to stay out of sight and work his way to the shallows. If he couldn’t stand up soon he was going to drown in his heavy clothes. He knew that there was a boat ramp close inshore, a concrete slope back up to the landing, slick with green algae—he could only hope the girls would be gone by the time he reached it. The waves were pushing him that way anyway; there wasn’t much he could do. Henry let himself be carried, drifting feet-first to fend off any obstacles, never so grateful to be wearing shoes.

  For a while he wasn’t sure he was going to make it. A number of times waves picked him up and hurled him into the pilings and jumbled boulders that made up the foundation of the landing, then painfully dragged him off again. It was a gauntlet of rough and slippery impacts. While in this deeply-shadowed grotto, he also ran into softer masses: sea anemones and sponges like limply-caressing hands, rubbery vines and flaps of kelp that threatened to entangle him…and something else.

  What happened next is only recalled in Henry’s worst nightmares:

  Swimming in the webbed green half-light of an undersea grotto, feet dragging over rocks, with tendrils of slimy brown kelp pulling you down and freezing saltwater sloshing over your head, you try to stay afloat. The back wall rises before you—the base of the ferry terminal. Veins of wiggly luminescence play across the underside of its bellied surface, an artificially sculpted surface: Weird, fleshy folds cut in wet rock that seem to heave and shift in the submarine twilight.

  Eyes. Immense bulging eyes laughing malevolently out of a giant stone face half-submerged in the sea. It is at least twenty feet wide, crudely chopped out of native bedrock and faced with a living, scuttling mosaic of black and red and green rock crabs, seething like lice in the furrows.

  The uneven, rough-hewn quality of the sculpture gives it the freakishness of a portrait drawn by a schizophrenic. It looks alive—the face’s grotesque expression of maniacal, devouring glee exerts a power that stops the heart, shuts down the mind, robs the body of any residual warmth. It roars—a thick, vomitous gurgle emanating from its hugely laughing/screaming mouth as water covers and uncovers it, that gulping maw seeming to want to suck you in.

  Unwillingly driven into that bellowing orifice, you come up against a barrier of thickly-rusted iron bars and hang on for dear life as wave-surge swamps your head and sluggishly retreats.

  A hand slinks through the bars, long fingers clamping around the back of your neck. Pinning you in place. “Did you draw the short straw, sonnyboy?” rasps a voice from within that dark, gated crevice. “Did you lay bets on whether I was dead?”

  Chin-deep in swirling foam, your face is pressed tight against the bars, staring eye to eye with a vision of horror more incredible than anything in your wildest dreams: a bleach-faced living corpse, gelatinous skin sloughing off like wet tissue-paper, nose a purplish crater, salt-crusted hair coming out in clumps. It stinks like rotting fish—you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Only its shining eyes seem fully alive, red-rimmed and bloodshot and bugging out of its head with wild intensity.

  “Stay with me, now,” its reeking, toothless open sore of a mouth beseeches. “If you stay with me I can keep you warm, snuggling in my heart of stone, on a bed of soft moss! Eternal night of glory! Learn the gift of holy prophesy as it was taught to me, and to the unbroken line of all who came before! Do it! There is no choice! If you deny this honor—death! A plague upon you and all you love! Stay with meeee—”

  The water covers you up again, and the rush of air escaping from the cave gives you a bare advantage over that clutching horror. You kick away, breaking free and not stopping until you are on dry land. By then you barely remember what you saw down there—all that is left is the fading aura of dread after waking from a fever.

  His mind blank, Henry was suddenly fleeing, thrashing for his life away from something so fearful it shook him out of his exhaustion and cold and growing acquiescence to just let go, to give in and sink. So horrible that he screamed and screamed, unable to stop though it gave him away and opened his throat to the waves, the screaming broken only by croaks of regurgitated seawater.

  The next thing Henry clearly remembered was hearing a familiar sound, so loud and powerful that it penetrated even this place and broke through his terror:

  BWAAAAAAAAAAA!

  It was the horn of the ferryboat.

  Careless of the girls—the girls all but forgotten—Henry dragged himself the last of the way in a blind rush, emerging back in daylight and slogging up the slippery ramp to the platform, using starfish as handholds. Lisa and her minions were nowhere to be seen.
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br />   He found his mother in fevered consultation with the ticket authorities, who were on the phone to the police. As soon as they saw him coming around the corner, they apologized and hung up, tapping her and saying, “Is that him?” indicating Henry’s pitiful, bedraggled form. Vicki cried out at the sight of him.

  “Henry! Where have you been, oh my God! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said dully.

  “You had me so worried!” She clutched him tightly, weeping with relief. “I came back and couldn’t find you! Where were you? What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh my God, did you fall in the water or something? Why are you all wet?”

  “I fell in the water. It was an accident.”

  “Oh no! Oh, honey! Are you all right?”

  Henry nodded sluggishly. Looking the gleaming white ferryboat, he asked, “Is it time to go?”

  “Are you all right? You’re hurt! Shouldn’t we take you to the doctor?”

  “No, I want to just go.”

  “Are you sure? Oh, honey, I was so scared…”

  “Yes, let’s go.” It required an extreme effort to focus, to crawl out of the depths of his shock and meet her frantic eyes. “Let’s go now, Mom.”

  “But you—”

  “I want to go now. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

  They boarded the boat.

  PART II:

  ANGEL’S TRUMPET

  Chapter Seventeen

  WAR DOGS

  “You don’t have to come with me,” he says, tying his shoes.

  “Of course I’m coming with you,” Ruby says. “I just don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish up there.”

  “One way or another I’m going to put an end to this crap. This has gone on long enough. I have a right to see my own mother—I owe it to her. Do you realize she turned down a dream job here because of me? Because of my girl problems? It’s totally because of me we moved away, and she’s probably spent the last thirty years feeling like she was kicked out of Paradise and wishing she could come back. Well, she finally got her chance, and now it’s my responsibility if she’s in trouble.”

  “How so?”

  “Because she got me out when I needed her to. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s come full circle.”

  Henry didn’t say what else he had been thinking: that the island had frightened him off once before, had pried open his head and taken root in his nightmares, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again. He wasn’t a little boy any more.

  “Do you intend to climb the fence, or what?”

  “I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but something.”

  “Well, I’m not bringing Moxie up there again—it’s too hard for me to film and watch her at the same time. We better see if that desk-girl can take her.” Ruby digs the card out of her purse. “Janet Bixby—‘Bix Bee Childcare.’”

  Henry is a little surprised to hear her say this, but he’s not about to argue. “Fine, whatever.”

  They go down to the lobby and are introduced to a cheerful, spry old lady in Reeboks who shows them the child-friendly back room where she and Moxie will be playing and doing activities. “Looks cozy,” Ruby says. “I like that there’s no television.” Henry agrees; the place has a warm, homey feel, with plastic tubs of well-chewed toys and books, but the main selling point is the enthusiasm of the caregiver, Mrs. Bixby.

  Even as Moxie starts to protest their leaving, the old lady flashes a mouthful of enormous white dentures and says, “Now, you guys don’t worry about a thing. I’ve raised ten beautiful children, and I guarantee that by the time you come back, Moxie and I are gonna be bosom buddies. She’ll be begging to stay, mark my words. Does she have any allergies? Because we’re gonna bake cookies, yes we are!”

  A few minutes later Henry and Ruby are free as birds. “Jesus, we should have done this a long time ago,” Ruby says, blinking in the daylight. “I feel like I just got out of solitary confinement.”

  “It’s true,” Henry says. “I feel a hundred pounds lighter.”

  Without any support network or so much as a babysitter, they’ve hardly had a minute to themselves since Moxie was born. It was so hard at the infant stage that they quickly fell into a combat mindset that tolerated hardships like the lack of a sex life or time alone together as acceptable losses; they were focusing on the essentials, their every waking second devoted to either work or the baby. Hardheads both, they took it as a challenge, and even as things have gotten incrementally easier they’ve kept to this regimen, though there are signs of fraying at the edges: In the last year, Henry has begun sneaking out to strip clubs and bars, and Ruby has begun taking an inordinate interest in yoga. Where they had once been able to talk for hours, their divergent interests have begun making them much more private, internal people. Their orbits have separated. This is upsetting in its way, but easily chalked up to the inevitable cooling that all marriages must undergo. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.

  “This reminds me of the walks we used to take along Lake Michigan,” Henry says.

  “Yeah, I can’t remember what I did with my hands when I wasn’t pushing a stroller—I keep having this terrible feeling like I’ve forgotten something.”

  He takes her hand in his: “Here’s what you do.”

  “So that’s it.”

  The stroll around the bay is the most pleasant time they have spent together since they were first dating, when Henry was still recovering from his surgery after being discharged from the VA hospital. He had met Ruby when chronic pain drove him to seek alternatives to his prescribed medications. She and her mother operated a pain management clinic out of their home, and Ruby was an expert in alternative therapies—it was actually one of the VA doctors who recommended her. Though very skeptical, Henry was willing to try just about anything. The first thing she did was get him off painkillers, to which he was badly addicted. The rest was easy.

  The town is just as empty as Henry remembers it, just as still, and they follow the shore past the Tuna Club and the Yacht Club all the way to the Casino without seeing another person. The water of the harbor is glassy-smooth, a window to the shallow bottom. It’s just after nine in the morning.

  “God, the light is perfect,” Ruby says, digging out her camera.

  Can we please give it a rest? Henry thinks. He hasn’t had much sleep, fretting most of the night over issues both real and imaginary, but which either way can only be addressed by concrete action. He can no longer do what he has been doing all this time: ignoring things. Hammering flimsy patches over them and pretending they don’t exist.

  “Do we have to shoot right now?” he asks.

  “Well, honey, this is kind of it, isn’t it? I mean, this is what it’s all been leading up to. I kind of have to chronicle your final thoughts, or people won’t grasp the full significance.”

  The full significance. Does Henry himself even grasp that? Why he is suddenly so interested in finding his mother, when he has been wishing her away most of his life. In fact, up until this most recent situation, he had almost succeeded. She had become unreal to him, a figment of his past no more distinct than any other childhood memory. In that way, her letters always came as something of a shock: messages from a ghost world he no longer believed in.

  Vicki herself perpetuated this sense of time-warp by never changing—by staying exactly the same as she had always been, as Henry remembers her from the earliest years of his life: slightly befuddled, completely out of touch with any aspect of popular culture or the wider world, dwelling only on the memories of her past, which are much more real to her than anything in the present. Disintegrating nicely.

  “I think that’s why I’ve always been so mad at my mother,” Henry says as Ruby circles around him, doing some cinema verite maneuvers. “I never quite felt that she saw me—it was more like she was looking through me at something else. This fantasy world of her own.”

  “Well, she is kind of out
of touch with reality. But then, so are most people.”

  “When I was a kid, I bought into all that, though. I thought I was sharing in her memories, that her history was mine, too, and that both of us were like…exiled royalty. Too good for the circumstances we were living in. That our paradise was right around the next corner—always one move away. Always next time.” He shakes his head. “But over the years it sank in that no matter where we moved, things were always going to be the same. The only way to change them was to live in the real world. To stop dreaming and actually do things. And once I knew that, her fantasy life became intolerable to me.”

  They follow the beach road and climb the path to the condo complex, surrounded by the drone of cicadas. Resting on a flat outcropping, Henry makes her put down the camera and says, “Honey, I just want to let you know something. I’ve only realized it since we’ve been here, but my life with you and Moxie has…healed me or something. I don’t mean just physically. All of a sudden I can examine the past without feeling all angry and twisted by it—it’s become harmless. That’s why I’ve been dwelling on it so much for these last couple of days: it’s the novelty of being able to look at it objectively, as something separate from myself. To really see it for the first time, you know? The Big Picture.”

  Listening to this, Ruby touches the side of his face, studying him with an almost clinical expression. Then she smiles and says, “I love these little ear points of yours.” Henry has an elfin nib of extra cartilage at the top of each ear, what Ruby calls his “faerie points.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Henry says. “I’m trying to tell you I love you.”