“Riots. Recession. Grew up there and got the hell out. Didn’t want to end up like my dad, drinking alone in windowless bars. Staggering home in the snow.” Dave fingered the neck of his bottle. “Maybe I’ll visit someday. Haven’t been back. My dad’s alone now.”
Professor Cleave lost his grip on his knife, and when he looked down, blood was beading on the tip of his thumb. He pressed his thumb into a hand towel. “Where’s the lady you were with?”
“She got a room. Probably just needed to pass out. Sure she’s fine.”
Professor Cleave watched Dave take a long swig of beer and wondered at the sordid nature of holiday trysts.
What did Professor Cleave know about sordid behavior? There was nothing sordid about Helen S. Mudge, except the damage she’d done to herself in such remarkably human fashion. She didn’t move when we squeezed from behind the baseboards and examined the sweater she’d cast to the floor, alternately drawn and repulsed by the scents of sweat and disinfectants clinging to its threads, and encouraged by her obvious disinterest in doing violence to anyone but herself. She sat on the edge of a bed, rubbing Betadine stains from her palms, listening to the air conditioner’s death rattle and observing our tentative movements with a meditative gaze. At sunset, she peeled off the gauze bandages taped to her arms, trailed her fingers along a line of sutures, and looked across the harbor at a thin red line rimming the horizon and the tiers of glowing windows giving shape to the Celeste’s receding form. Then, with a mystified expression, she considered her reflection in a smudged mirror. She was an anemically white wisp fading in the waning light.
If only the reasons for Helen Mudge’s quiet accommodation with us had been less depressing. Only two days earlier, she’d become the ultimate paradox: a failed suicide. This, even more than the damage she’d done to herself, had left her utterly dumfounded. She was, after all, the daughter and granddaughter of two highly accomplished suicides.
She discovered this at the age of ten, at a family barbeque. While chasing toads in her backyard, she came upon a dead sparrow. A curious child, she lifted its broken wing with a stick and examined the maggots writhing in its chest cavity. Her father watched from the patio, stricken by the morbid curiosity of his only daughter.
“Don’t ever play with dead things,” he said, crossing the lawn to spread a fan of paper napkins over the bird. “You’ll have nightmares.”
An hour later, Helen sat alone in the backyard, just beyond the pale of glowing paper lanterns, eavesdropping on the conversations of intoxicated adults.
“Most girls would have run screaming,” her father said. “But then, her mother always had that same morbid streak. I shouldn’t have been surprised when she jumped from that roof.” He took a long sip of gin. “I just didn’t think she’d leave me with a newborn baby. A girl.”
“Between that and her grandmother’s arsenic cocktails, you have to wonder if suicide’s hereditary,” her aunt said. “You’d think it would be hard to pass along the genes, but I guess some people only get depressed after the kids show up.”
After dinner, Helen sat down beside her father and listened to the crackle of mosquitoes electrifying themselves in a bug lamp. “I read mosquitoes only live for one day,” she said hesitantly. “Do they fly into the bug zapper because they’re sad?”
“It’s in their nature.” Her father gazed at a shriveled hot dog left on the grill. “It’s inevitable.”
That night, Helen spent hours staring at a Polaroid image of her mother, noting each similarity between her own features and those fading under a gloss finish, and anticipating the impulses that would bring about her own death.
“It’s inevitable,” she whispered over and over.
Conditioned by foregone conclusions, she lived her adult life by default. After graduating from law school, she accepted a job in the legal department of a Chicago gas company and adopted the life of an emotional ascetic. She shied away from close friendships and avoided long-term romantic entanglements, opting for casual encounters with incurably fatuous or terminally ill men. She renewed short-term leases on apartments furnished with items from downscale chain stores—pressboard tables with peeling veneers, dressers with badly glued joints, and sagging plastic bins. She took her possessions’ rapid depreciation for granted; she inhabited a world without a future, a world not worth saving. She ended up in St. Anne entirely by chance, after winning a voucher for a Caribbean cruise at a work party raffle. By the restricted terms of a special offer, she booked a Deluxe Interior Stateroom, a windowless cabin not far from the Celeste’s massive engines. Death is inevitable, but the doomed need something to do in the meantime, after all.
On the Celeste, she passed joyless hours in the company of cheerful strangers. She exchanged pleasantries with Baptist missionaries in a cupcake-decorating class. She won eleven dollars from a slot machine and downed margaritas with a divorced dentist. She waltzed with a former U.S. ambassador and traded ping-pong tips with a defrocked priest. She watched diapered monkeys riding unicycles and chorus lines of sequined women dancing in feathered capes. With an armchair art critic from Montana, she wandered through carpeted galleries, appraising Picasso knock-offs and oil paintings of kittens. At a formal dinner, she drifted through conversation with a Texas matriarch hunched beneath the weight of gold chains. Later, in a quiet piano bar, she realized she couldn’t remember the name of a single person she’d met on the ship, and that she hadn’t tasted anything in days or enjoyed herself in decades.
“It’s inevitable,” she whispered.
She spent the following morning in her cabin, pacing before a painting of a sailboat foundering in the trough between bleeding watercolor waves. Each time a vibration moved through the floor, she shuddered at the sense of constant drift leading nowhere. In the afternoon, she wandered the decks alone, pausing in the shadows of lifeboats to contemplate cherry-red smokestacks and the black smoke trailing in their wake. She watched seagulls skim the ocean’s surface for floating refuse, mesmerized by their graceful movements and the endless sky burial of trash. She imagined the end of ambivalence, the silence and peace after all struggle ceases.
When the Celeste docked in Barbados the following day, she remained on board, leaning against a deck railing. Beneath her, dead fish and foam containers floated on iridescent oil rainbows. Entranced by the water’s metallic sheen, she drifted into decision. In a drugstore off the promenade deck, she bought a box of fat-free cookies, a bag of gumdrops, a pack of razor blades, a cheap magazine, and a bottle of aspirin. She threw everything but the aspirin and razor blades into a trash bin outside the store.
She expected a literary suicide, the weightlessness and release of Ophelia floating in warm water, the gentle ebb of life and the slow surrender of regret. The intensity of pain stunned her, and the rush of adrenaline filled her with panic. The edges of her vision blackened, and through a collapsing tunnel, she saw stark red fans unfolding across the water filling her bathroom sink. A chill seized her, the walls groaned, and she grasped the horror of solitary death in a windowless room. With her arms folded in a towel, she staggered from her cabin and into an elevator, down hallways and through a crowded restaurant, past melting ice sculptures of mermaids. Beyond a set of open French doors, she collapsed beside an empty deck chair. Silhouetted gulls circled in the afterglow of sunset and grew indistinct against the horizon. Regretting only their passing, she drifted in and out of consciousness, dimly aware of someone screaming and unmoored faces hovering above her.
From the Ambassador, she watched the Celeste’s lights fade and tried to recollect two days nearly effaced from her memory. That morning, she’d awoken to the stab of an intravenous needle sliding from beneath her skin. After receiving a vacuum-sealed pouch containing her dry-cleaned dress, she signed forms covered in fine print, naming herself as the sole party responsible for her injuries and waiving her rights to future claims. A security guard escorted her through a crowded infirmary, along monochromatic passages suffused with the sme
ll of sickness, past dyspeptic crew members and small mounds of absorptive dust, and down a service gangplank. An American touched her shoulder and said something about the swiftness of Caribbean sunsets, and she’d followed him without question to a waiting cab. She’d let him carry her suitcase into the lobby and summon a bellboy.
For the first time, she imagined strangers going through her cabin and collecting her things, bleaching the sink and talking about the latest suicide, or worse, the weather. She broke into a sweat and slid from the bed to open her suitcase. She found her clothes, crumpled as she’d left them, and a pouch containing her toiletries, a bottle of aspirin, and a box of razor blades collected by an unsparingly efficient staff. She held the box in her hands, studied its torn cardboard edge, pressed her fingertip against an exposed blade and twitched.
She was staring at the blade when she heard knocking—muffled, it seemed, by the deepening gloom. She struggled to her feet and pressed her eye to a peephole. The bellboy was floating fish-eyed at the end of a tunnel. His knocking stopped and resumed, grew more insistent and intolerable as she forced her arms into her sweater. When her sutures caught in its sleeves, she cast the sweater aside and opened the door just enough to frame her face.
The bellboy held out her driver’s license. “You left this at the front desk. They told me to bring it.”
She slid two fingers past the door. He hesitated and then slipped her license between them.
“You carried my bag,” she said. “I meant to give you something earlier. I wasn’t feeling well.”
She trailed off at the sight of his arms, covered in raised scars she hadn’t noticed earlier, drew a sharp breath and pressed a hand to her lips.
“I won’t bother you again,” he began.
He stuttered, once, and shuddered. The muscles in his face rippled and his fingers curled into his palms. He pressed a loose fist against his temple, and she gripped the edge of the door. When his shaking subsided, she stepped back to open the door wide, but he’d already started down the corridor, trailing his fingers along the wall to steady himself.
Traces of his cologne and sweat, the presence of something pungent and cutting, lingered in the room. She listened to the erratic buzz of a fly skating around the sink and contemplated her own horror, no less cruel for being unintended. She stood shivering in the darkness and ruminating for nearly an hour. When she felt the first hunger pang in days, she placed the box of razor blades on the bathroom counter and glanced at a room service menu. Sick at the thought of the bellboy, she gathered her sweater from the floor.
She found Dave in the lounge, leaning over the bar and hanging (inexplicably, we thought) on every one of Professor Cleave’s words.
“Whole crew’s back together.” Dave patted an empty stool. “Remember Wynston? His friends call him Professor.”
Professor Cleave wiped his hands in a towel and considered her vacant expression. “You were in my cab.”
“She could use a Cane Cutter,” Dave said. “And I’ll take another.”
“What’s a Cane Cutter?” Helen asked.
Professor Cleave reached for a bottle of rum. “A machete. For cutting cane.”
“He’ll give you a whole lecture. I should get a goddamn college degree for drinking here.” Dave lit a cigarette and turned back to Professor Cleave. “Anyway, these guys were fine getting arrested for stripping copper. Middle of winter. Happy to have three hots and a cot. Ended up being three hundred hots.”
Professor Cleave pressed his thumb and finger together. From the edges of rubber floor mats, we ingested bits of rind and tried to quell the movements of our antennae. He was staunching a flood of memories, and we feared he’d be tempted to recite Geoffrey Morrow again on the way home. Helen sat quietly, grateful to be spared the demands of conversation by Dave’s drunken monologue. She said nothing until Professor Cleave placed two drinks on the bar.
“Yours is different.”
“Skipped the Coke,” Dave said. “Skipped the ice, too, because of this drought he was telling me about. Extreme measures for extreme times.”
“You mean double measures for difficult times,” Professor Cleave said.
“Nothing difficult for me. I’m a free man now. It was a goddamn plague ship. Restaurants closing. Slipping on shit every time you walked down a hall.”
“The infirmary was crowded.” Helen looked down at her lap. “By the time I left.”
“Hand-sanitizing stations everywhere. Hell, we got off just in time.”
“You never mentioned what it was,” Professor Cleave said.
“Some virus. Happens all the time. This one’s just getting around faster than usual.” Dave raised his glass. “Here’s to freedom.”
Helen tilted her head back and let her drink slide down her throat.
“Eat something before you go hard, sister.” Dave slid a menu in her direction. “They got club sandwiches. Can probably get them anywhere in the world.”
She nodded, and Professor Cleave wrote a note on a pink order slip. He considered her anemic cast and calmed himself with the fact that she’d ordered food.
“I’ll have someone bring this order to the kitchen,” he said, glancing at his watch and imagining the whereabouts of Tremor Prentice, the Ambassador’s lone bellboy.
Happy Hour, for us, ended the moment Helen placed her order. The club sandwiches at the Ambassador were nearly indigestible, and given how long it took Tremor Prentice to deliver anything, the chances of the two Americans hailing a cab to Portsmouth before the night’s end seemed slim indeed. Once again, we faced an evening of insurmountable boredom in the lounge. DJ Xspec’s Heavy Vibes Hour was about the last thing we’d be likely to hear coming through the lounge’s outdated sound system. However abysmal Portsmouth nightlife, the owner of Reef Wrecks at least had KRS-One and Fab 5 Freddy on vinyl. Despairing, we quietly seethed and slipped into the nearest air ducts in search of different company and tolerable snacks.
We might have expected too much in the way of easy entertainment. Still, we found ourselves incurably dissatisfied, bristling at loose comments about getting a “goddamn college degree” simply for drinking in the presence of Professor Cleave. How rudimentary Dave Fowles’s education was, and how easily earned, relative to our own! Any cockroach subjected to Professor Cleave’s endless lectures should have been given an honorary degree from Harvard and treated to a cruise on a garbage barge off the coast of New Jersey. What really frosted our collective ass, though, was our frustrated desire, our desperate need for decent music. This, Tremor Prentice, sitting high above on the Ambassador’s roof, would have understood.
WONDER
THE VIEW FROM THE Ambassador’s rooftop would hardly have merited comment by those who have watched, as we have, the sun set behind the Golden Gate Bridge from the Fairmont Hotel, or beheld the Nihonbashi River from the top of the Mandarin Oriental. Still, we often found ourselves drawn into the Ambassador’s service stairwells and storm drains and onto the rooftop, which afforded views unrivaled, at least, on St. Anne.
After the British built an airstrip, we used to watch the occasional plane ascend over the mountains and disappear into clouds that seemed almost within reach. We’d marvel at their speed and wonder how we ever survived journeys in the cramped holds of sailing ships. On clear afternoons, we’d trail our antennae in the breeze and pick up radio transmissions from around the world. We’d spend hours listening to Calypso Rose, and as time passed, Miles Davis, the Ramones, and DJ Xspec’s Heavy Vibes Hour. At night, we’d trace the shapes of constellations and wonder at the beauty of life so far above the ground. We’d forget that our wings were brittle and flight nearly impossible, and that gravity held sway over our affairs.
Trevor Prentice, or Tremor as he called himself, used to sit on the rooftop and smoke weed to escape the Ambassador’s most boorish guests and Professor Cleave’s constant harangues. He would have been surprised to learn that Professor Cleave, in his younger years, had spent quite a bit of time on the r
oof himself. Of course, Professor Cleave went to the rooftop to read. On the rooftop, he first encountered the writings of Max Weber and James Baldwin and, much to our regret, Geoffrey Morrow. He’d survey the coastline and reflect upon historical contingencies and possible futures. He’d forget the watch on his wrist and the dirty towels lying beside the pool. He’d forget the sway of circumstance over lofty ambitions.
Both Professor Cleave and Tremor went to the rooftop to be alone, or so they thought. Little did Professor Cleave know that he was disturbing our quiet reveries each time he read aloud. Little did Tremor know that, whenever he lit a joint, we’d emerge from rooftop drains and enjoy, secondhand, God’s greenest grass.
Without dwelling on specific ratios of THC, CBL, CBND, and CBT, we can say that Tremor grew tremendous weed, the sort best ingested in a relaxed frame of mind, in the company of compassionate sorts willing to overlook others’ foibles and laugh at themselves. Simply, it was heavy shit with somewhat unpredictable effects. Tremor often menaced us with his lighter if we got too close, so we hid in the shadows when we partook, drawing thin trails of smoke from drifting clouds and tuning into radio stations around the world. For a succession of fleeting instants, we’d be as one, connected via tingling antennae to every cockroach on every rooftop on Earth, tripping through infinite space and meditating like six-legged bodhisattvas tasting something of Nirvana.
It’s safe to say that Tremor Prentice lived in complete ignorance of Geoffrey Morrow. What’s more, he would have scorned Morrow’s purely academic interest in certain herb-bearing seeds. Yet Tremor was, far and away, one of the best gardeners on the island. He’d developed remarkable methods for conjuring and cross-fertilizing magical herbs in the ruts of abandoned cane fields. He possessed a subtle appreciation for the earth, a keen insight into its delicate yield and stubborn refusals. He knew how badly it had been poisoned. He’d been born, after all, amidst the pungent smell of tidal muck and grown up like a weed on St. Anne’s most polluted ground.
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