Under Radar

by Michael Tolkin

  “But it was one step in the service of a goal. They wanted to live on an island and build a retreat for others who were like them. I don’t know whose idea it was, but they settled on a resort for expert scuba divers, and they’d never gone diving themselves. A dive resort instead of a regular hotel because the guests would come bringing their own interests, and the resort wouldn’t need to tell people how to have a good time. Very methodically, after my parents learned to scuba dive and became experts, they traveled around the South Pacific for three months, visiting every island that had a good reputation for diving and at least a grass landing strip for small airplanes. They settled here on Taveuni, to be near the coral fans. At the end of the second year, I was born. As my father likes to say, I’m the boy he wanted to be and he’s the father he wanted to have.

  “To an outsider, I’m sure my childhood looked perfect. I had freedom and responsibility. From the beginning, I had work to do at the club, and I could go alone anywhere on the island. All my friends were Fijians. There were a few white children, but I never felt part of their world, because my parents stayed out of their parents’ society. The other innkeepers. That world. Rum at five. Lots of affairs. It wasn’t what my parents were here for. They barely drink. When I was thirteen, my father told me, ‘We’re going to kill the Fijians someday. I don’t know when. And you’re going to help, you’ll have to. The collapse of civilization will make peace between the races impossible. There’s others we know who’ll come to the island and help us. Every race is going to fight every other race until one race stands alone. I’m sad about this, I don’t hate anyone. I don’t hate the Fijians, they’re wonderful people. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t let you play with them. But they have to die, otherwise they’ll kill you, and me, and your mother. And you don’t want that. One day the whites on this island, even the people I don’t talk to, are going to wake up to their necessities, and we’re going to gather all of the darks and put them in one place on the island and kill them. And you’ll help.’

  “I asked if my mother knew this. He said she did. My mother, in her dedication to the organizing power of the end of the world, had calculated the likely damage the island would suffer after the seas rise when the icecaps melt. On her reckoning, they built the resort up on the bluff instead of along the beach. Not that she expected tourism when the waters rose, but other white people who washed up onshore would need a place if they were fit to be kept alive.

  “What my father forgot was that I was born here. He shouldn’t have told me his plan, because I was one of them. I am a native Fijian. So it was my responsibility to save my people from my father.

  “One afternoon when I was fourteen, while my father was on the dive boat and my mother was at the airport meeting the plane, I went to one of the guest rooms to steal something. I found a gold Rolex hidden inside a running shoe. I watched the bungalow when the diver came back from the reef that night. It took about fifteen minutes, and then he began screaming and ranting, and called for my father and accused the staff of theft. My father said the staff was honest, but the man persisted because the watch had been in the toe of the shoe, hidden behind the sock, and the sock was on the floor. My father asked him why he hadn’t used the safe, and the man said that safes are broken into. My father said, ‘And shoes are sometimes stolen,’ and the man said, ‘Yes, and so are watches.’ So my father called for Ako, the housekeeper, who my father was desperate to believe was innocent, because if Ako was a thief, then the Fijians were just like everyone else, and their deaths would have no tragic glory, and when he killed them he wouldn’t be playing out a tragedy, he’d just be slaughtering children. So I was happy, because his vision of the world was melting. And if it wasn’t, at least he was miserable, and that was good enough for me. I was sorry for Ako, that was my only guilt, when my father went with the owner of the watch to Ako’s village and complained about her to the Chief. My father told him that if word got back to the tourist world about the thieves of Fiji, business would disappear. ‘And what then?’ he asked. ‘And what then?’

  “The chief beat Ako, and she cried, and I wanted to throw up. I ran home to the club, took the watch from where I’d hidden it, went back into the man’s bungalow, and tucked the watch into one of his other shoes. He apologized to my father in the morning and gave him a hundred dollars to give to Ako, but my father made him apologize to Ako directly, and to her chief. It was a mess, everyone on the island knew the story.

  “My father wanted to kick the guest out of the hotel, but my mother said that this would only make for trouble, and the man was contrite.

  “I waited two weeks for a new set of guests to be flushed into the hotel, and I stole a good dive watch. The owner complained, and my father told him he’d investigate. Two days later, the watch appeared under the man’s pillow, and he told my father that he’d found it. My father said to me, ‘That’s the second time this month.’

  “And then there was the third, and the fourth, and more. I stole watches, knives, and cameras. When the guests reported the thefts, my father told them to look again while he made his own investigation, which of course he didn’t, and then, sure enough, everything always came back. My mother suspected the staff, but after watching them closely and asking me to watch them as well, we agreed that no one was stealing anything.

  “‘People weren’t always this forgetful,’ said my father one afternoon.

  “My mother agreed. ‘Whatever it is, I hope it’s not catching.’

  “To make it catch, I needed a simple delivery system for the virus. It was Stephen King who showed me the way. One day someone left a copy of Insomnia on a table in the lounge, with a postcard for a bookmark. I went back to my room for a double- edged razor I’d kept from one of my thefts, and I very neatly sliced five pages from the spine; the first of the cut pages was two pages from the guest’s bookmark. The page on the left ended in a thought that seemed to continue on the right. I hovered around the lodge that night, helping my father at the bar, until Insomnia’s owner opened the book to the postcard. I watched him as he struggled with a sudden loss of meaning. He stopped, read ahead a few pages, read back. What had he missed? Why was the book losing any sense of itself? What was wrong with Stephen King? He read ahead again, to see if he could pick up King’s hidden meaning. Then he saw the gap in the page numbers, and he started to swear. He threw the book away and went back to his room. My father asked, ‘What was that about?’

  “I said I didn’t know.

  “After this, I sabotaged every novel I could safely grab for a few minutes. I knew which pages to cut in the complete works of Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Ellroy, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Rice, and Elmore Leonard. When the readers stumbled over the gaps, they went crazy. After the moaning and groaning, they threw the books against walls, into the trash, into the fire when we had one.

  “My poor father; everyone was out of their minds as far as he was concerned. The world was sending him people who couldn’t keep track of their brushes, combs, and watches, and the world couldn’t print a book. It all made sense. There were gaps everywhere now.

  “‘The mind of the world is turning into Swiss cheese,’ my mother said. ‘The world is getting stupid-sloppy.’

  “My father included this insight in his usual declamation to new guests. ‘It’s happening all the time. That’s one of the reasons Beryl and I left Australia. We could see it all coming. And it’s the little things, you know, spelling errors in advertising, or your book getting to the bookstore with pages missing, that are the real signs to me that the so-called civilized world that you live in is heading for a terrible fall. And they accept it, that’s the horror, they accept that in their forties their minds are going senile, and they don’t even have long enough memories to complain, they don’t remember what they’ve lost, to try and make changes in the world.” And there was a sentiment he stopped expressing. He used to say, ‘I’m not saying that island life has all the answers, but it’s a better place to be raising a c
hild.’

  “But he didn’t believe this anymore. The decay of the world, in these tiny manifestations, convinced him that the spreading plague had poisoned everything, had poisoned Fiji. My parents hate the guests now, and the whole endeavor of the club is becoming a bore. They think better of the natives, who forget nothing and lose nothing, because they have nothing. So they deserve the island to themselves. Because of a few pages missing from a horror novel, my father is ready to abandon his dream of massacre. I showed him that the white world has nothing left worth saving.

  “‘The world is dying,’ he told me. ‘And I’m sick of the Reef Club. I don’t know what to do.’

  “And he probably wouldn’t have known what to do if the nurse hadn’t found me in her room this morning. When I saw her heading to the dive boat, I went to her room, but I didn’t know that she had sprained her ankle stepping into the launch and decided not to go. She was coming back into her room just while I was slicing a few pages out of The Vampire Lestat. I couldn’t cover for myself, the pages and the blade were in my hand.

  She asked me why I was in the room, why I was holding the book and the blade. I said I found the blade on the floor. I said I was changing the lights, that it was one of my jobs, going around the rooms to change the lights.

  “She said the lights were fine.

  “I said that one of the maids had said a light was out and I was checking on it.

  “And why didn’t I have a replacement bulb?

  “I said I wanted to see which bulb was out.

  “She said they all looked like the same kind of bulb to her. What about the book?

  “I said I was just taking a peek.

  “Anne Rice, she said, was too spicy for a boy my age.

  “I said I knew that, and asked if she would leave the book with me if she finished it.

  “She said no. ‘What about the pages,’ she asked.

  “‘Oh,’ I said. I picked up the book, and the pages fell out. ‘Books are very badly made these days. Ask my father.’

  “‘And he’s an expert on printing?’

  “‘He has a theory about the world, and it starts with books.’

  “She told me to leave her alone.

  “I found an empty hut where someone was reading Insomnia, and sliced one page.

  “That was this morning. You saw the rest. I feel badly for my mother. You saw me get her to hug me, Tom, when the nurse was yelling at me. My mother was ready to trust me, but when I hugged her, she recognized a strategy. She may have held me close, but she was someplace else, the same place she goes the hour before sunset, after the guests return from the water and before they hit the bar. In that hour, my mother can sit on the lodge’s veranda and drink her tea and watch the cloud shadows on the lagoon. By the time the blue sky is flame, the guests are already drunk. Although my father needs to show his face before dinner, my mother has, for years, withdrawn from the guests’ predictable excitement over the display. It was the sunset, the view, the daily worship of just that sunset and the satisfied melancholy it allowed which had drawn my parents from Australia, but selling it to the guests spoiled something.

  “Degraded by the drunken ovations for the sunset, the sunset became a movie my parents had seen too many times. Leaving the sunset to the guests, my mother learned to settle her account with the day a few hours early; she became a connoisseur of the late long shadow. This was as close as she came to religion.”

  “That was some hug,” said Jan.

  Eddie asked, “Did your parents say anything about the books?”

  “They didn’t have to. I saved my people, you know, but at the cost of my family. This is good-bye.” And with that, he climbed into his kayak and paddled home.

  The Mimesis crew sat up talking about him. “I wouldn’t have done the same,” said Jan, “but what else could a boy do to protect himself against such a murderous father?”

  “But his father didn’t kill anyone,” said Eddie. “It was just his fantasy.”

  “He told his son. And his son couldn’t have known that the father was so weak.”

  Tom thought to say, But that’s just what the son knew. He kept his tongue since it was only an interpretation, and no more right than any other. Wanting to know the rest of the story, he went to the lodge in the morning, in time to see the nurse leaving for the airport. Half an hour later the plane took off, passed over the lagoon, leaving the island quiet again. Alan and his parents sat on the veranda. A copy of The Firm, torn in half, lay on the floor.

  The phone rang, and Beryl answered, then put Alan on. Tom walked away, already taking leave of the island. He knew their stay was over.

  It took a week to stock the boat with food and gear for the trip to Hawaii, and in that time they saw Alan only from a distance. Jan tried to talk to Pete and Beryl, but they retreated behind the wall that years of professional courtesy had built. They could play the roles they’d made for themselves without ever letting whatever was real in them, if anything was still real in them, from showing through.

  The last good-bye was formal and friendly. Tom asked the Pooles to remember him to Alan, but they didn’t say they would.

  Pete said it, “We’re selling the club. We’re going to travel.”

  “The three of you?” asked Eddie, looking for trouble.

  “Alan’s going to school in New Zealand to get ready for university.”

  “We’d like to say good-bye.”

  “We’ll tell him.”

  ...

  The Mimesis had been at sea for two days when Alan climbed out of the spinnaker bag.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t go to New Zealand. I couldn’t go to school.”

  “This is bad,” said Eddie. “I have to take you back.”

  “Please don’t,” said Alan. “They want to get rid of me, and now I’m gone. They don’t care.”

  “This is kidnapping,” said Jan.

  “But they don’t know I’m here. Before I slipped onto the Mimesis, I took a skiff and towed the kayak into the channel and let it go. They’ll have seen by now that the kayak is missing. They’ll figure I paddled away and either killed myself or was washed overboard by a wave. They won’t look for me with you. I have a lot of skills. I can fix anything. I want to see the world and pay my own way. I have my passport. I’m old enough.”

  Tom doubted this, but Jan and Eddie accepted what the boy said.

  “Will you ever look them up and tell them what happened?” asked Jan.

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Someday, when you’re older and you’ve learned to forgive them, you should find them and tell them about yourself.”

  “I’m not ready for that yet.”

  Tom asked why he didn’t want to go to school in New Zealand.

  “They put me on the phone with the school’s rector. I couldn’t stand him. He asked me about the books I’ve been reading and how they had gotten to an island without a bookstore or library; what team sports I’d be interested in playing at the school; and whether I was really fluent in Fijian, and if I was, would I speak some to him, because he spoke Maori and he wanted to see if they were close. I told him about the nurse in Fijian, but he didn’t understand. I can’t go there. I can’t go there. I know it. I just can’t.”

  On the watch that night, with nothing between the boat and Hawaii, Tom thought about the headmaster and what he must have said, and what he might have thought of this boy. Tom imagined that the man would have worried about Alan’s years on the island, between cultures, neither American nor Australian nor truly of the old colonial society, leaving him with a distant perspective and no solid self, no single identity inside of him, no source of confidence to build connections to new people. Tom imagined that an insightful headmaster would see Alan as an unfortunate loner, too old to be changed by one year of school. Tom imagined that the headmaster would try, though, because that was his job. Tom assigned the headmaster a wife whose grandfather had a mission in Tonga, wher
e her father still ran an inn.

  He imagined the headmaster saying to Alan, “My wife loves the islands.”

  To which Alan responds, “You don’t?”

  “Oh, when I was young, yes. I don’t need to see them anymore. I’ve been there, you know? Palm trees, lagoons, the whole advertisement come to life. And the sun, I’m afraid I had a bit too much when I was the vagabond. The little moles on my back are spreading. If we knew then what we know now about melanoma, I would have worn long sleeves all the time. Anyway, that’s all past. Now, when we can, we head straight to Sydney, and every other year we visit friends in San Francisco. New Zealand is backwater enough and island enough for me.”

  Six

  The outboard grumbled in the swell as Tom climbed into the dinghy. The waves, five feet, small whitecaps, pitched the rubber boat into the Mimesis and lifted the screw out of the water. Spinning in the air, it made a desperate complaint. Alan, sitting low in the stern, held fast to the tiller. Tom rode in the front for balance.

  “Are you sure you can make it back?” asked Tom.

  “I grew up on the sea. This is nothing.”

  Jan gave Alan the handheld GPS with the catamaran’s position already set. They would meet back at this spot after Alan dropped Tom at a safe place in Honolulu Harbor. Then the Mimesis would enter the harbor, where Alan and the Dodges would register with customs. If Tom’s passport, when it went through the American computers at customs, betrayed him as a felon convicted overseas, they would all be in trouble.