A Marker to Measure Drift

by Alexander Maksik

  “Well,” she said, but then didn’t finish her sentence. She couldn’t say that she was leaving, that she had somewhere to be. If she did she’d have to walk in the direction of that place and there was no place. The only place she could go with confidence was the black beach below and she didn’t have the energy for that—not for the walk down, and not for the danger, which she was sure lay in wait.

  “I suppose I should get my group together. You’re welcome to come along. Free ride down.”

  “No,” Jacqueline said, practicing that casual stretch she’d learned from the women on the beach. Ease of leisure. Body at peace. Alert to nothing. Everything in the background. Eyes closed. Sun on skin. Changing light.

  “No, I think I’ll wander around up here a while, but thank you. For the offer, for the tour. I should pay you,” she said and smiled, this time looking directly at her, daring her to accept.

  “It’s nothing.” The tour guide extended her hand and smiled as if she were indulging the fantasies of a child.

  They shook hands and the pressure of that woman’s grip caused such a fluttering agitation that she turned away.

  “You really like it up here, don’t you?”

  There it was again, that quiet note of condescension, of suspicion. It was suspicion, wasn’t it? It made her furious and yet she was so shaken by the simple pressure of a hand in hers. She was paralyzed by the two emotions. Anger and what? She did not know.

  “I do,” she said. “It’s very peaceful.”

  “It really is. Among all these ghosts. Well, we’re up here every morning through the summer. Maybe I’ll see you again. And here’s a card, if you and your husband ever want a private tour, give me a call.”

  “Sure,” Jacqueline said, convinced she was being mocked.

  “Take care of yourself,” the tour guide said, waved, raised the umbrella, and went about rounding up her charges. Obediently they followed her down to the parking lot, where the bus sat alone on the black asphalt, the driver standing by the open door, smoking a cigarette in the sun. Far below, Jacqueline could see another bus beginning to make its way up the road.

  “You don’t believe even in a spirit?” Saifa asked.

  Jacqueline had graduated and was home from England. Eighteen years old. Her father had invented a job for her and she’d returned, breaking her promise. My little minister of tourism. What timing, he’d said on the telephone. Ghankay president at last, and you with your expensive diploma. Come home and you will see. Everything has changed, my love. Do you know what he says? He wants Liberia to be the Hong Kong of West Africa! Come home and see it.

  Even across the ocean she could see him beaming, so full of pride and stupid faith.

  So she came home.

  And in the mornings the car arrived, her father held the door for her, and together they rode along Randall Street, and through the gates of the Executive Mansion, where she had a small office with a desk and a window.

  And a green telephone.

  I’m calling from the ministry of tourism, sir. We’d like to invite you to come visit our country. Our new country. You’ve never seen such beaches. A secret paradise, sir. And Bomi Lake. Also known as the Blue Lake. A national treasure. You’ve never seen such colors. And our tropical forests. And English, sir, we all speak English. And President Taylor would be happy to cover costs. But why not write about the future, sir? Why not write about that? This is not the old Liberia. This is President Charles Taylor’s Liberia, sir.

  Day after day in her business suits. Jacqueline clicking along the hallways to her neat little office. And the evenings drinking with the journalists and the UN workers at the Mamba Point Hotel.

  Have you seen these beaches? Why not write about the future? No, the war is over, sir. The war is over.

  Yes, her mother said. Why not write about that? What did you promise me, little liar? Never come home, I said. Never come home, you promised.

  “You believe in nothing, JaJa?” Saifa had come to look so much like their father. Her cheeks fatter now, the same smile, the same bright eyes.

  Jacqueline shook her head. “No, not even in a spirit.”

  “So what are we then?”

  “Flesh and water. What do you think we are?”

  Jacqueline home with the arrogance of someone who imagines she’s seen the world.

  But it was Saifa who’d seen the world. Little Saifa, educated at home, by tutors until the tutors vanished, by the radio, by what she saw out the windows of their car.

  “But what’s the thing that keeps us alive? Even if there’s no God, there’s a spirit in us. Something like that?”

  Jacqueline shook her head again. “We are our bodies, and we are memory. That’s it. That’s spirit. That’s God.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Saifa looked away.

  Jacqueline couldn’t resist taunting her sister, couldn’t resist torturing her by using the veil of truth telling. “We’re all going to die.”

  Now she regretted it.

  “You don’t know,” Saifa said.

  Their mother was in the kitchen arranging white pepper flowers in a glass vase the color of dry palm fronds.

  Their father was upstairs in his office.

  “I know. And when you have children and you die, you’ll be left in their memory. And when I die, you’ll keep me in your memory and that’s the only way there’s God. That’s it. No matter what she tells you.”

  Jacqueline had nodded her head toward the kitchen, where their mother was humming “Who Are You Baby.”

  “Why do you get to die first?”

  “I’m the oldest, SaiSai. Because I’m the oldest.”

  HER MOTHER WAS LOOKING out the window from the backseat of the black Mercedes. The engine was running, the air conditioner was humming. She was waiting for her husband with her wide sunglasses on.

  “Not once has he been dressed before me. Not once,” her mother said, sucking her teeth in irritation, straining to see herself in the rearview mirror, pursing her lips.

  And then they both turned and watched as he came out of the house, smirk on his face, black leather loafers shined. He was sliding the gold Rolex over his hand, spreading his fingers to drop it into place. The coconut palms were bending and hissing in the hard wind and just then she could hear her mother make a quiet, familiar sound—sigh of love, sigh of appreciation, of helplessness, of disapproval.

  And then he was in the car.

  DO YOU SEE, MY HEART? The only things that remain atop this mountain are those things that cannot be blown away.

  Jacqueline shook her head in irritation. Clichés. Truisms.

  And I am one of them.

  You are one of them, her mother said. Snide little girl. Arrogant shit. You are one of them.

  You’ve said the same about places that have been obliterated. People too.

  You make a choice, her mother said.

  What kind of answer is that?

  But she was gone. And in that moment, Jacqueline understood that she wanted one thing.

  She wished not to be alone.

  The sunlight was a pale orange cobweb spread across the island. The beauty of that view was unavoidable. The sheer vastness of it. The sun changing shape as it entered the water—contracting and expanding. Saint Irene was radiant, was burning. The far islands were shuddering silhouettes, purple and black and infinite.

  Because of the spectacle and the beauty, because of the terror of the coming dark, in spite of herself and in spite of reason, she began to pray.

  She prayed. Not for her father. Not for her mother. Not for Bernard. Not for Saifa.

  She prayed for company and she prayed for the capacity to endure company.

  Then she watched the sun disappear. She tried not to blink. She tried to imagine the earth moving. She tried to imagine riding its great back. She pressed her hands flat against the ground. She kept her eyes on the sun and swore she could feel the world takin
g her, hurtling away as the sky at the horizon burst and divided into orange and blue, pink and yellow, and then little by little everything went dark and Jacqueline began to cry.

  She was thinking of the way she used to walk into parties.

  OVER THE FOLLOWING DAYS she waited until the tour guide had come and gone. The woman was predictable—always arriving when the sun was a hand’s distance from the far mountains. Later, when the other buses came, no one seemed to notice Jacqueline and she felt free to wander the ruins, or sit in the amphitheater, or, most often, lie in the shade of her cypress trees watching the landscape change color.

  She paid attention to the way the wind rose and fell with the passing day. She tried to understand what it meant when the far sea took on white caps, what the sunset colors meant, what it was that drove the lizards scurrying across the rocks.

  She was beginning to learn the island’s language. She weighed that idea and was sure there was no madness in it. It was a kind of intimacy, but the other? That she was being received? This suggested a madness to which she could not commit. Not yet.

  She did not believe it to be true. It was a fantasy, but it was becoming powerful—this notion that she was in communication with the island. Perhaps it came from spending so many hours watching it. Perhaps it came from keeping her face pressed so close to the ground, her hands in the needles, her feet in the dirt of it, her body so exposed to its ever-present wind. There was solace in this.

  But whatever it meant, it was also true that she had begun to believe that somewhere far out below her, somewhere along that ridge, along the shore, beyond her to the north, something was receiving her thoughts. That someone was listening. No, not listening. Not listening, but receiving, absorbing, responding to her somehow.

  And talking to me is not madness, my love? How is one thing madness and the other thing not? What do you call the other thing, by the way? I don’t remember. What do you call it? Reason? Logic? Sanity? Idiot girl.

  The difference is clear. It is not the same, because you are memory. The other is something else entirely.

  I see, her mother said, gazing at her over the tops of her reading glasses. The smirk had softened. The expression was no longer superior, no longer one of bemusement. It had become something else, something containing sadness. She was sitting in the brown leather chair. She was reading something, but Jacqueline could not see what. There was a glass on a coaster. Gin and tonic water and the juice of a whole lime over ice.

  Do you see the distinction? There’s a difference. A tremendous difference between recollection and madness.

  Her mother said nothing.

  What was there on that mountain was what was left, what had not been blown away, exploded, shaken free, or burned. The blocks of limestone. The lizards. The cypress trees.

  SHE WAS ACUTELY AWARE OF CHANGING LIGHT, but not the chain of days. After a certain amount of time she was surprised to discover there were only a few almonds left. A little water.

  She thought there might be a certain dignity in this kind of death. In riding the earth away from the sun, through the moonlight, steadily breaking down, depriving herself of nourishment, dying there in the wind on the mountain. There would be a dignity in that, a dignity in the decision.

  And while she thought, her mother watched. Jacqueline saw her somewhere she could not place, in a room she did not know, with a gentle expression she did not recognize.

  Jacqueline waited.

  She looked out across the island and time became passing colors. The ground shifted and turned beneath her. There were noises she did not recognize. The moon was brighter than the sun. She spoke and believed she was heard. The sky seemed to thicken. Far below her, drowning in moonlight, the vineyards, the farms, broke in half and broke in half again and again and divided into pieces she believed she could carry with her.

  When she woke she was exhausted and thirsty and her head beat with sharp pain. She forced herself upright and sat with her back against a tree. She emptied her pack at her feet and took inventory. She would have to leave this place. She did not want to die.

  SHE PUSHED HER PILLOW to the bottom of the pack and folded the blanket and laid it on top. She wore one of the two long skirts, one of the three tank tops, one of the two bras, one of the two pairs of underwear. The rest she folded in around the blanket. The blue rubber sandals were side by side on the brown needles. The visor she wore pulled down over her eyes. She kept the tube of ChapStick in the left pocket of her skirt. She slid the empty bottle into the top of the pack and pulled the drawstring to close the main compartment. Along with her toothbrush wound with pink toilet paper and her passport, there were twenty-seven euros in the small zippered front pocket.

  After she stood and slipped her feet into her sandals and hoisted the pack onto her back, there was nothing left of her here. The place had been something, had mattered in a way that the cave had not. She had an impulse to kick her foot through the needles, break the evidence of her bed, but she left it.

  It was a small thing, but she left it there.

  Her slight impression in the earth.

  Jacqueline turned and came out from the shelter of her cypress blind. She made her way through the ruins and found her place high in the amphitheater. She was weak, but she was calm.

  She had made a decision.

  THE BUS CAME UP THE HILL and hissed to a stop in the parking lot. Soon Jacqueline saw the top of the pink umbrella moving through the air. And then there was the woman—bright-eyed and polished. Like a washed car, Jacqueline thought. The sound of the voice, though not the words, came through the air. And then there was the group assembling at the edge of the amphitheater.

  So now you trust this woman with the shiny knees?

  When she drank too much, her mother spit to punctuate her sentences.

  “Hush,” Jacqueline said aloud. “Please,” she whispered. “Please be quiet.”

  “Jackie,” the woman called and pointed her umbrella at her as if it were a sword.

  “Hello,” Jacqueline said when the woman arrived, black hair fallen about her shoulders.

  “Thought I might find you up here again.” She sat down so that they were side by side.

  “It is a beautiful place.”

  “It is, it is, but there are other places so much more beautiful.”

  “You think?”

  “Oìa for one, yes. Hard to imagine that you’d come here from there. I think Oìa is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.”

  “In the world?” Jacqueline turned and looked at her.

  “In the world, yes, absolutely. More beautiful than anywhere I’ve ever been.”

  Jacqueline liked the woman’s eyes when she said this.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, which, she thought, was at least the truth.

  “Well, sometimes a place just strikes a person.”

  “Is that where you stay when you’re here?”

  “No, I wish. But no. We have a house in Imerovigli. I stay there. Have you been? It’s also very pretty, but no, not the same.”

  Jacqueline shook her head.

  “Well, you should come. Have a glass of wine one night. Bring your husband.”

  “You’re very nice.”

  “Oh, not all that nice. Maybe just a little bored,” she said.

  “Bored?”

  “It’s a small island.”

  Good, her mother said. Now you’re an entertainment.

  Jacqueline smiled.

  “What’s funny?”

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me. Go on.”

  Somehow, in that moment, the woman reminded her of Saifa—her belligerent enthusiasm, her relentless cheer.

  She was having trouble keeping the tour guide’s face in focus, and yet she began to laugh and couldn’t stop herself. She became dizzy and, afraid she might be sick, hung her head between her knees.

  “Are you okay?”

  Jacqueline shook
her head, but couldn’t speak. For a moment everything went black. When her vision returned she was still in the same position—elbows on her knees, head in her hands.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine, fine.”

  “It’s just you went very still there for a bit. Have some of this. Here.” She held out a small plastic water bottle and crackled it to get Jacqueline’s attention.

  The noise was very loud. She took the bottle and finished it. Then she raised her head. “I’m sorry, I forgot to eat breakfast and didn’t drink enough water, I guess.”

  The woman moved her hand up and down Jacqueline’s spine, pausing between vertebrae, as if she were examining her.

  “Are you okay?” Now she spoke in a lower register, a quieter voice of tenderness. “Mana mou,” she said. “Why don’t we go find some shade.”

  Jacqueline nodded. She’d begun to feel nauseated again. There is no danger in shade, she said to her mother, who shook her head and held her tongue.

  The woman took Jacqueline’s elbow and helped her up. They stood still together. The wind had died and she was very hot.

  Then they began to walk.

  If she kept her head down, and did not speak, and relied on this woman’s steady arm, she could follow her feet. And like this they made their way. But instead of finding a place beneath a tree, the woman guided Jacqueline down the hill toward the parking lot. She took her up the steps and into the bus and put her in a seat of such extraordinary comfort that there in the cool shelter she closed her eyes and began to cry. The pleasure was shocking—the velour covering against her legs, absence of wind and noise, the steady stream of cool air.

  Then she heard the low hum of the idling engine. She had been elsewhere. No lingering image remained, only heat and fear and exhaustion. Now she could feel the bus trembling beneath her and the woman—Callie, Jacqueline remembered her name—was sitting at her side offering a thick square of chocolate.