by Tom Crockett
The hazy figure once again coalesced into the form of the Turtle Woman. “Go, then.” The Turtle Woman gestured up, but up seemed as dark as down, and Marina did not know whether to trust this direction. Her ability to think clearly was failing. She felt desperate but also tired, as if she might drift off to sleep.
She kicked up. She seemed to rise fast. She looked up, trying to see light. The pool could not be this deep, she thought. The water seemed to shimmer around her and grow a little brighter, as if she were swimming in a shaft of light. Moonlight. She realized she was swimming in the shaft of moonlight that had penetrated the pool. It seemed to be drawing her up, pulling her toward the source. She felt embraced in a different way. The light overhead grew brighter and brighter until there was nothing but light, then nothing.
When she woke she was once again on the smooth, cool stones beside the pool. Her jacket and hair were not wet, not even damp. Atana sat where Marina remembered she had been, solid and unmoving, like an onyx statue, her eyes half-closed.
The moon had gone, passing beyond the circle of trees, and the night sky seemed to be coloring with the first light of morning.
“So, what will you do?” Atana asked.
Marina sat up slowly. “I want to go on. I don’t know what that means completely, but I think it’s what I need to do.”
“You have found what you lost, then?”
Marina thought about this. Yes, she felt somehow as though she was more complete, more whole. There was a little girl in her that could still be awed and amazed by beauty—connected to every living thing. There was a mother, nurturing and caring, a balancing force. There was a lover, present and attentive, inside of her—someone who could live in the moment—a woman who could fully accept her erotic power.
“Yes,” Marina answered. “I have found some things I thought I’d lost forever. And there’s more. I think . . . no, I know I’m ready to live again. I think I could do it better now.”
Atana said nothing, and after a moment Marina continued. “That is what this is all about, right? That I might have a second chance?”
“And what do you think would happen if you returned to the life you had been leading?”
Again Marina thought a moment before trying to answer. “I’m not sure what you mean. I suppose I would try to live a better life.”
“And had you been living a bad life?”
“No,” Marina explained, “My life has not been bad. It’s been very rich, actually, but I’ve been living it badly. I lost touch with things, lost parts of myself, like you said. But now I feel as though I have them back.”
“And can you keep them?”
“Keep them?”
“Can you keep these souls you have recovered?”
“All I can do is try.”
“And how will you try?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you want me to say. Isn’t it enough that I’ve recovered my lost souls and that I’m aware of them within me?”
“There is something you still need to learn, child. It’s the real reason you are with us here. This is Turtle Island, the island of sanctuary. You are here not just because you were in need of sanctuary. Sanctuary was ever-present around you. No, you came to us because you couldn’t find sanctuary in your life. You couldn’t define it or create it, so you had no respite, no relief. Your souls scattered because you offered them no safe place. If you do not learn how to make sanctuary in your life, you will not long keep them.”
“I’ve been to sanctuaries. I’ve been to retreats. I’ve been on pilgrimages, but none of that seemed to help me much.” Marina’s head was spinning. Here was a person who seemed able and willing to answer her questions. She had so many questions.
“Sanctuary is different things to different people. First you must come to sense the sanctuary in places. This is sanctuary.” Atana spread her arms and gestured to the pool and the circular grove of trees. “But it is only a reflection of this sanctuary.” Atana touched her own chest lightly.
She was silent a moment, then, as if dissatisfied with her own explanation, she continued. “No, that is not entirely true. When a place of some subtle energy comes to reflect sanctuary for many people over time, it becomes a sanctuary of great protective and healing power. The mirror pool has reflected souls for many of the lost and wandering. It is a powerful place in its own right.
“Not everyone who crosses Turtle Island comes to the mirror pool. You needed to see yourself more clearly so you found it. Do you know what you have learned since coming to Turtle Island?”
Marina thought about the question for a long while. She looked at the anklet the Turtle Woman had tied upon her. The word “balance” came to her mind. “The Turtle Woman spoke to me of balance. When I was first here, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t feel anything. I suppose it was like my life before. I couldn’t really feel anything when I was alive, either.” Another correlation crossed Marina’s mind and it excited her. “I couldn’t move myself out of my depression, either. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t feel when I was alive and that’s what I experienced after I died. Why did I think it would be different?” Marina asked the question without actually expecting an answer, and Atana offered none.
“She said I needed to find balance, to find light to equal my darkness. Basic rules of exposure.” Marina said this last sentence more to herself than to Atana—speaking in the language of photographers.
“And what else?”
“Rafael,” Marina said softly. “I was to learn something from Rafael, wasn’t I?”
“There is purpose in every experience—both here and in your world. Your task is to understand that purpose.”
“Was Rafael real, then?”
“As real as you or me.”
“But was he like me? You said I was one of the lost and wandering. Was he lost and wandering too?”
“He exists apart from your needs. He is on his own path. You will meet others like him if you go on.”
“What will become of him?”
“I don’t know. That is up to him.”
“Did I cause him pain? Did I interrupt his search?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
Marina searched inside herself. An answer came to her but she wasn’t sure she trusted it. “I was as much a part of his journey as he was a part of mine, right?” Atana nodded. “But he helped me understand something incredible about my own senses, about living in my body, living in the moment. What could I have taught him?”
“What did he do for you?”
Marina smiled and her left hand went absentmindedly to the stone talisman about her neck. She considered telling this woman about the sensations she’d experienced, but something more important, more relevant popped into her mind. “He sacrificed his own progress to help me move on.”
Again Atana nodded, clearly pleased in Marina’s answer. “And don’t you think it was valuable for Rafael to know that he could act this selflessly? You brought him this opportunity.”
“Will I see him again?” She wasn’t sure why she asked this, but she’d said it before she could stop herself.
“Here,” Atana gestured around her, “who knows. But in some life it will be hard to avoid him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You ask so many questions. I cannot answer them all now. You must make your own way forward or go back now.”
“I want to go forward. Whatever I have to learn, I want to learn.”
“Then go now and see if you can learn the art of sanctuary.” Atana stood up in a slow, graceful motion like a flower unfolding and offered Marina her hand.
Marina took it and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She stood a head taller than the old woman, but somehow felt small in the woman’s presence.
Atana led Marina around the stone pool. At the far side of the stone face with the cave entrance in it, a path led between the trees. Marina had not noticed it before and it seemed almost as if it had opened up a
t Atana’s request.
At the foot of the path, just where stone met packed earth and twisted roots, a bundle lay waiting. Atana picked it up and handed it to Marina. She inspected it and found some sort of waterskin in a pouch with a long strap. There was also some bread and dried fruit wrapped in large leaves.
Marina thanked her and slung the pouch over her shoulder. She looked up the path between the trees. Daylight was filtering slowly through the dense canopy. She looked back at Atana.
The old woman took a few steps to the pool and knelt beside it. She dipped her hand and arm into the water holding the sleeve of her robe out of the way with her other hand. She did not reach down far before grasping something and removing her hand from the water. Marina could not imagine that the bottom of the pool might be that shallow. She was sure it must extend far below the level of the ground.
Water dripped from her fist as she extended her hand to Marina and opened it. A smooth flat pebble shined like black glass in her palm. Marina picked it up and marveled at it.
“It is a little piece of the mirror pool. Take it with you to remember the souls you carry within.”
Marina looked at her own reflection in the black stone. She could see herself in surprising detail. The first thing she noticed was the turtle tattoo. It was now crossing her face. It marked her high on a prominent cheekbone and made her look almost feral. It was a tribal mark, wild and significant, but it was also much fainter than she had recalled. She turned to Atana and started to ask.
“Yes, child, you have little time left. When the turtle’s mark fades you will be without compass. You will be as lost as you ever were. Go now, and I will dream for you.”
Marina took the old woman’s hand and bent to kiss it. She pressed her lips against the back of the woman’s still-damp fingers and tasted the strange silvery flavor of the water. She turned then and started up the path.
She had not gone far before she was out of the grove of tall ancient trees. When she looked back she could see no clear path back into the grove, only a path forward.
She realized the stone was warm in her hand and she stopped to look at it.
She saw her own reflection, but then that grew cloudy. Out of a mist that seemed to fog the stone from the inside, a moving figure materialized. It was the Turtle Woman, young and beautiful, her wild hair floating about her. She blinked languidly and smiled. Marina was both attracted and repulsed. This was the same woman or spirit who had helped her, who had encouraged Marina to make this journey. Now she seemed to be calling Marina back.
Marina shoved the stone into the shoulder pouch she carried and walked on hurriedly. The path ahead was clearly marked. It led up through an open forest. Each time she looked back, what had seemed like a well-defined trail ahead of her appeared in retrospect a random selection of turns.
She wondered how she could know if she was truly going in the right direction. Was she moving backward or forward? The Turtle Woman had said something about Marina’s finding her nightsong irresistible. Was she moving toward life or back to the death she had so willingly sought?
She was, for the first time, frightened. She was frightened of the attraction she felt for returning to death’s embrace. She was frightened that what she had learned, what she had recovered, would not be enough to see her through.
She was no longer dispassionate about the journey she was making. Until that moment she’d taken what she’d found with little desire to choose one course over another. Now life called her and she wanted to answer.
CHAPTER 5—A QUALITY OF LIGHT
While some argue that it’s the stars that steer sea turtles on their great migrations, others pledge allegiance to the sun. Would the warmth on my back be enough to guide me? Breaking the surface every thirty minutes for sunlight and air, could I find my way? We know our way by time as much as by compass now. There are great stone turtles half buried in jungles where time is reckoned differently. These turtles carry sundials carved into their backs, though the sun no longer penetrates the green canopy to cast the telling shadows.
Marina walked on.
She climbed steadily during the morning, crested a ridge around noon, and walked on fairly level terrain into the afternoon. She stopped to rest several times, drinking water from her pouch and eating the dried fruit.
Late in the day she began to notice a change in the trees around her. They seemed to open up. The trees themselves were taller and the trunks wider. There were fewer trees and more sunlight filtered down to the forest floor. It didn’t look like island ecology. It reminded her more of the redwood forests of northern California or the old growth stands of timber she had hiked in as a girl.
The trees were majestic and the plants on the forest floor seemed almost arranged, like a Japanese Zen garden. Ferns and delicate lacy plants with tiny white blossoms dotted the ground. Purple and blue flowering shrubs colonized little ponds of sunlight. Stones thrust up from the ground, almost artful in their randomness.
There was something odd about the trees as well. Some of the smaller, younger trees seemed to have twin trunks that grew together. Even some of the taller trees seemed to have once had two distinct trunks. Though fused together now, she could still see where they had been joined. She also began to notice that some of the younger trees had trunks that bulged voluptuously in places, as though the bark had grown over human forms. With a little imagination she could see the whole forest as alive with dancing giants. Perhaps they had been frozen into the shape of trees by the spell of an evil sorcerer, or perhaps it was her own presence that caused them to disguise themselves.
But as strange as the shape of the trees might have been, Marina was even more fascinated by the light. To an untrained eye, the sunlight cascading down through the trees would have been spectacular, but to Marina it was almost unbelievable. It was golden and green, sepia and olive-tinted. Some shafts seemed almost red-orange, as if they had shone through a shard of stained glass lodged somewhere high up in the trees. She knew she was seeing not just the color of the light but the colors the light illuminated. All of that and something more.
She wished she had a camera with her, and this thought surprised her. She had not felt the desire to photograph so strongly in years. Of late, she had come to spend most of her professional time getting to a place. Her cameras went with her, and, when she arrived at the confluence of some moment and some event, she photographed it. She never thought about whether she wanted to photograph it or needed to photograph it. She seldom thought about photography at all. It was a job for her, perhaps an obsession, but no longer a passion.
I could be passionate about this, she said to herself as she studied the light.
She wandered, forgetting about a path, looking up, looking around.
She had once loved life, loved beautiful things. As an adolescent, she had tried to make beautiful pictures with her camera. She studied Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Andre Kertész, Imogen Cunningham. She looked at the way they used light in their images. It was a palpable thing, this light. She could feel it, harness it, work with it in her own photographs.
Her early work was so beautiful that some editors refused to run it. It looked staged, set-up, they told her. No one could get that lucky, so consistently. But fellow photographers came to Marina’s defense. She wasn’t lucky, they told their editors. She was more patient, more sensitive, more skilled at taking advantage of the play of light. Journalists and photographers who traveled with her were amazed at her uncanny gift for knowing how the light would fall on a subject and when the trajectory of subject and light would intersect.
It was a delicate gift. While she honored it, it served her well. But once she squandered it with angry work, work meant to prove a point, it abandoned her. After Baghdad she gradually lost her ability to sense the movement, the weight, the very presence of the light. When it showed up in her images, it truly was luck.
Now, here, in this place, she could feel the light again. It was like a force, like a warm presen
ce. She stood in a little puddle of light and stretched her arms up the shaft. She felt like Danaë, locked in her father’s high tower, visited by her lover, Zeus, in the form of a shower of gold.
“You can really feel it, can’t you?” a man’s voice asked.
“Yes.” She answered the question before registering that it had come from another person and not just her own thoughts. When it occurred to her that someone else had actually spoken, she snapped her arms down to her side and looked around. At first she saw nothing.
“Here,” the voice spoke again and this time Marina followed it to its owner. A man sat cross-legged beneath the low-hanging branches of a huge tree. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Somehow, once Marina realized that the man must have been sitting there before she arrived, and that she was the one who had wandered into his space, she relaxed. She wasn’t certain what the protocol for territory was on Turtle Island, but she had yet to meet anyone who had intended her harm. Still, she was cautious.
The man seemed to sense this and made no move to approach Marina. “I’m Téves,” he said. This helped Marina little, but it seemed meant as a friendly gesture.
“My name’s Marina.” She didn’t say Marina Hardt, but she was suddenly aware that she had remembered her last name. She wasn’t sure when it happened. When she first woke on Turtle Island she could not remember her last name, now she could. It had just come back to her.
“Welcome to Adytum Wood.” He still made no effort to rise but spread his arms to gesture to the grove around him and made a little bow. Marina moved closer, self-consciously adjusting her jacket as she went. The little belted jacket was still all she wore and, while it covered her upper body, breaking just below the tops of her thighs, she tended to get careless about how she wore it and sometimes it revealed more than she was conscious of. This hadn’t mattered when she was with Rafael, or Atana for that matter, but now it did seem to make a difference to her. It was as if she was regaining some sense of propriety as she traveled across the island.