The Wonder That Was Ours

by Alice Hatcher

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHALK IT UP TO the Ambassador’s miserable menu, but the night Helen and Dave arrived, quite a few of us were on the roof, engulfed in smoke and floating in streams of music only we could hear. But all happy hours come to an end, as did this one, thanks to an ill-timed order for a club sandwich. Just as we began to dissolve in waves of pale light reflected off distant planets, Professor Cleave’s voice and a burst of static came through Tremor’s radio. What a buzzkill. The proverbial snack bowl had run dry, we thought in our addled, metaphor-mixing state, and scattered into the shadows to escape Tremor’s hostile vibes.

  Tremor turned off the radio hanging from his belt and became a bellboy without a bell, a red-eyed renegade drawing from a joint in a futile attempt at forgetting. He tried to blot out the memory of Professor Cleave and the woman who had studied him from behind a nearly closed door, shunned physical contact, and stared at him as if willing his hands to shake. He entertained nebulous fantasies of revenge, momentarily exhilarated by the turmoil in his mind, and just as quickly succumbed to shame. Humiliation, while stoking his hatred, had marred its purity. He looked up at the attenuated arms of galaxies and the outlying stars pulsing beyond their reach and tried to quiet his mind, but the world was spinning too quickly, leaving white tracers across the sky. He gripped the polyester stretched across his knees and his eyes slipped out of focus. Slowly, he became aware of faint strains of music drifting across the harbor and stars assuming their places in familiar constellations. He uncurled his hands and massaged his thighs, struggled to his feet, and made his way across the roof on unsteady legs.

  In the narrow enclosure of the Ambassador’s service stairwell, he spat curse words and spiraled downward, past identical doors to identical floors. At the bottom of the stairs, he peered into the space between switchbacking flights and experienced a perverse sense of vertigo, a fear of falling upward. Stillborn laughter caught in his throat, and he pressed his hand against a wall to regain his balance. We should have fled his path, but between sleep deprivation and smoke, we felt cognitively clouded and emotionally stretched from our antennae to the tips of our tarsi. We were craving carbohydrates in the worst sort of way and hoping to discover some odd delicacy left in the staff lounge. Desperation knows no bounds.

  The staff lounge had hardly changed in decades. White kitchen uniforms and smocks stained with dried sweat hung from exposed water pipes along the ceiling. They had the appearance, Tremor thought, of ghosts given form by bent wire hangers, limp specters of servitude resolved to haunt him. Unnerved, he rifled through the contents of dented lockers and then turned to a set of books stacked on a shelf. He considered their broken spines, selected a book at random, and collapsed on a couch with torn cushions. Hunched over a yellowed page, he ran his fingers over his scalp and traced the shape of his skull. He struggled through successive words, tripping over syllables and understanding little but hearing, still, echoes of Professor Cleave. Like drops of dirty water in his inner ear, they unbalanced him.

  He scratched the side of his face and imagined Professor Cleave standing before him. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he said.

  Overcome by the static filling Tremor’s mind, we crawled beneath the couch and lay down in dust. Our antennae had been strained to the point of exhaustion all day, and Tremor had become dangerously unpredictable. He clutched the book and closed his eyes, and his legs began to tingle. Again, Tremor had the tremors.

  Tremor hadn’t always been called Tremor. He’d been given the name Trevor at birth, one week before the worst hurricane in St. Anne’s history destroyed his home, a tiny fishing village nestled beneath a jagged outcropping of rock. Even before the storm, Rocky Point had been less a village than a line of shacks above a beach that seemed, at times, a receptacle for the world’s refuse. Turning tides never reclaimed the bottles and bits of garbage that washed up or the innards of gutted fish left on the sand. Still, Rocky Point wasn’t a stagnant backwater, as its smell might have suggested. (It was a tropical paradise offering every variety of edible trash for six-legged travelers.) Its human inhabitants enjoyed a livelihood that sustained them from year to year. Every morning, Rocky Point’s men set out in tiny boats, and beneath the cliffs marking the edge of their world crossed themselves out of habit and cast their nets. No one went hungry. Destitution, unaddressed, would have been an embarrassment to all.

  People even looked out for Mary Clay, or Crazy Mary, as everyone called her after her husband drowned. Overcome with grief and longing, she started leaving half-eaten pieces of fruit, offerings to unnamed gods, on her stoop to secure her husband’s return. She erected crooked crosses of sticks and twine near her house, beside piles of stones and animal bones imbued with cryptic meanings. She drew abstruse signs in the air and held whispered conversations with the wind, and then with us. Over time, she began to feed us, placing scraps of food on her floor whenever she saw us. For that, and then for much nobler reasons, we fell madly in love with her.

  Her house eventually slid into disrepair, but she spurned anyone who offered to buttress its sagging roof. Her husband, she insisted, would do this when he returned. If her neighbors avoided her, they engaged in thankless acts of charity, leaving squash and potatoes on her cinderblock stoop. Even after it became impossible to distinguish her ecstatic fits from her inebriated outbursts, some left bottles of cane liquor.

  Except for Mary (and us), no one in Rocky Point anticipated the storm that would utterly transform their village. Three days before the storm, our antennae began to tingle. As if attuned to barometric imbalances, Mary buried her bone collections, pulled frayed ribbons from the trees around her house, and burned pages torn from her well-worn Bible. She started carrying her dead husband’s compass, a rusting artifact of days filled with love. The day before the hurricane hit, she stood at the water’s edge with outstretched arms to welcome her husband’s return. For the first time, she shooed us away, and perhaps thinking we possessed functional wings, she urged us toward higher ground. Only at the last minute did she take shelter in the hills, sweeping us along in the folds of her skirt as rising swells brutalized the shoreline.

  The hurricane left little on St. Anne untouched. It obliterated houses and swept away cars, carried the contents of storefronts out to sea and heaved silt onto streets. It saved its worst violence for Rocky Point. It left the beach strewn with shattered furniture, broken picture frames stripped of familiar faces, and boats half-buried in sand. It washed away Rocky Point’s tiny cemetery and the abbreviated histories inscribed on wooden markers. It left shredded fishing nets dangling from uprooted trees and dead chickens and goats floating near shore. It left an embittered community of people who thereafter believed in God in the way of people who fear and hate him.

  Within months of the storm, American developers descended upon St. Anne. They bought up devalued properties and dredged the harbor, constructed a cruise ship terminal, and converted derelict plantations into exclusive spas (creative destruction, indeed!). They imported Chinese shrimp, Australian lobster, and Pacific cod on massive cargo ships and laid a ring road for day-tripping tourists seeking panoramic views from brightly painted taxi vans. By design, the road curved inland at the island’s northernmost point, away from the unhealed eyesore of Rocky Point. By the time Rocky Point’s inhabitants salvaged their boats, the economies of scale had tipped against them. Despairing, they sold what they could in Portsmouth’s open market and spent their afternoons drinking to forget while their malnourished children played amidst garbage and the scales of dead fish.

  As years passed, Rocky Point’s inhabitants embraced their isolation. They mistrusted outsiders and flaunted social conventions of every kind. They recycled scraps of fabric to fashion tattered trousers and formless dresses. They reviled books and newspapers and surrendered the village school to the rule of spiders and mildew. They drank at unconventional hours, disregarding distinctions between morning and night. Lost in alcoholic reveries, they talked more often than not about t
he past, and their fading memories became both a refuge and a source of torment. As the generation raised in wreckage came of age, outsiders spoke of atavism in Rocky Point, basing their impressions on the scabby children who gathered in the weeds along the bypass to throw dirt clods at taxis and rental cars.

  Trevor was one of these children, playing in the overgrowth covering the concrete slabs of vanished houses and in waves laden with trash. One afternoon, he was standing to his waist in water when a riptide dragged him beneath the waves, over submerged engine parts and broken bottles and into darkness. When he regained consciousness, he was lying across his father’s knees, coughing up the sea and convulsing. He lay wrapped in blankets for days, badly concussed and trembling. Even after his fever broke, he continued to suffer episodic bouts of shaking induced by fear and, in time, rage. He never again ventured into the sea, though he often stood on the beach, staring at the waves with a haunted expression and remembering the rush of water that had blotted out the sun.

  He was a curiosity at first, and then an object of ridicule. Other children followed him, shaking their hands, knocking their knees and mocking his dead mother for producing such an oddity. The only person they taunted more than Trevor was Mary. They followed her wherever she went, muttering and shuffling in grotesque exaggerations of her strange speech and limping gait. In the interest of self-preservation, Trevor joined their parades, sickened as much by self-betrayal as by his cruelty toward another, until the day he shook during a hazing of Mary. His hands trembled, his knees buckled, and he collapsed beside a rotting log to the calls of Crazy Mary, Crazy Trevor, and then Crazy Tremor. When he looked up, Mary was staring at him with unmistakable pity. He struggled to his feet, singled out the oldest of his persecutors, and bloodied the boy’s face with his fists. When the boy’s legs gave out, Tremor kicked him in the ribs. When he tired of kicking him, he beat the boy with a stick until the stick broke, and then he spat on his face. When he turned around, Mary was tracing signs in the air in a way that both disgusted and terrified him.

  The beating established Tremor as a person to be feared and flattered. Seared by the memory of abuse, he shunned his peers and silently railed against Rocky Point. As an adolescent, he showed little interest in fishing and spurned the men who gathered on the crumbling pier to reminisce about days when the reefs teemed with fish, women were prettier, and young men had more courage. He renounced his father’s stories as the alcoholic fantasies of a man so badly twisted by a hurricane that he could only look backward.

  By the time he turned sixteen, his disgust had fermented into shapeless anxieties about the future. He spent hours walking along the ring road, breathing the exhaust of taxi vans and watching cloud shadows race across fields of feral cane. Returning to Rocky Point, he’d dread the sight of barefoot children covered in mosquito bites, women in patchwork dresses, and men with sunken eyes and sagging pants. Soon, he began stealing away to Portsmouth with change secreted from the jar beside his father’s bed. He spent hours staring at window displays and willowy women sauntering down sidewalks in clinging dresses and bargain-bin jewelry. He envied young men standing on street corners, trading jokes and insults and ignoring the few tourists who ventured from the duty-free mall.

  To gain admission to Portsmouth’s street-corner society, he took a job as a bellboy at the Ambassador. He was less demoralized by the cost of bus rides from Rocky Point than bent on making the acquaintance of deliverymen and dishwashers familiar with Portsmouth’s back streets. Within a year, he became a familiar if fringe member of a group dominated by EZ, a small-time smuggler who kept Trevor at bay because of his worn shoes and village ways.

  Only a sudden seizure enabled Trevor’s ascent through the ranks of EZ’s friends. Squinting into the sun one day, he nearly walked into the path of a speeding car.

  “I know that man,” EZ said, watching the car round a corner. “We’ll mess him bad.”

  Tremor’s head bobbed and his fingers curled into trembling fists. When his shaking subsided, he braced himself for ridicule, but EZ slapped him on the back and laughed.

  “You smoked some bad shit.” EZ wiped away a tear. “Maybe I got some bad shit, too.”

  Looking into EZ’s bloodshot eyes, Trevor grew lightheaded and incautious. “Get tremors sometimes. Used to be called that. Tremor.”

  “Trevor with the tremors,” EZ said. “Tremor, our man.”

  From that point, Trevor carried the name Tremor. Rebranded, he bought new clothes, went to parties in apartments filled with smoke and old stereos, and drank liquor distilled in hillside villages. He formed friendships based on new phones and false stories about the origins of old scars. Most nights, he stayed in town, collapsing at dawn on a torn couch or dusty floor.

  “You’ll need another job to pay for those shoes on your feet,” his father said one afternoon.

  “The hotel gave me shoes with the uniform. Don’t worry.”

  “You’re the one who needs to worry. Looks like they paying you more than the prime minister.”

  “Working extra,” Tremor said, trailing his fingers over the phone in his pocket.

  On this rare occasion, Tremor was speaking the truth, thinking of the marijuana plants he’d cultivated in an abandoned cane field above Rocky Point, where he spent his nights away from Portsmouth admiring jagged leaves glittering with moonlit crystals. He showed his illegal tender more tenderness than he showed his many girlfriends, including the guileless maids who smoked his weed and slipped him keys to the Ambassador’s empty rooms. With his most constant lover, a young mother with stretch marks across her breasts, he simply unzipped his pants and lay back on dirty sheets. He never met her eyes when she straddled his narrow hips or called out his name and collapsed. He never minded her callused hands or the smell of disinfectant clinging to her. That changed one afternoon, when she posed a question as cutting as her ragged nails.

  “Why don’t you shake when we lie together?” she asked. “It would be fun.”

  He thought to strike her, but she was already moving on top of him, so he closed his eyes and conjured an image from a magazine. A minute later, he slid from beneath her, buttoned his shirt, and slipped from a dirty room that seemed dirtier for her presence. On the rooftop, he lit a joint and looked down at the patio, where a white-haired American was waving a credit card to hold the unsteady attentions of a young woman. From that point, he hated those who took for granted all he desired, and in emulating those he hated, he came to loathe himself.

  Not long after, he began stealing from guests’ rooms, feigning interest in conversations with maids scrubbing toilets while he slipped jewelry and crumpled bills into his pockets. If his successive lovers were sacked for stealing, cheap seductions sustained his sloppy sex life. He curried favors by selling overpriced joints to gullible guests and distributing meaningless gifts to girlfriends. In this way, he only confirmed his worst suspicions of human nature. The only person Tremor despised more than his girlfriends and the Ambassador’s guests, and even more than himself, was Professor Cleave, the straightest and most sexless man he knew.

  To be fair, Professor Cleave was tightly wound on his best days. He would have blown the curve on the Friedman-Rosenman Test with his type A+ personality, and he was especially agitated when he wandered into the staff lounge in search of Tremor. His agitation and Tremor’s hostility made us glad we don’t have alphas fighting it out within our own ranks. Humans’ massive heads, we’ve often thought, serve as little more than the seats of swelling egos, teacups for raging chemical storms. The irony, then, that Professor Cleave found Tremor on the couch, staring vacantly at a passage in Select Essays from the Age of Reason.

  When we saw Professor Cleave, we nestled beneath gum wrappers and braced ourselves for a round of chest-beating and bipedal antics. It was Professor Cleave’s most dreaded anniversary, and Tremor had the appearance of someone getting paid without breaking a sweat, between his new phone and smooth hands, and the glow of easy sex and smell of weed surroun
ding him.

  “I’ve been looking all over,” Professor Cleave said. “And here you are, smoking yourself into a stupid state.”

  Tremor tossed the book aside and looked down at his phone. “Makes no sense.”

  “You’re thick in the head. You don’t understand a thing because you don’t put forth the effort.” Professor Cleave snatched the book from the couch and placed it on the shelf. “And you’ve been going through things again.”

  Tremor slid his fingers across his phone’s glowing screen. “Wasn’t going to take it.”

  “You should know your lying and thieving have been noticed. When you steal, you lose something of yourself. You amputate part of your character. It’s an abomination.”

  Tremor shook his head. “You make no sense to anyone.”

  “Shameful. A disgrace. That is the meaning of abomination.”

  “This place is an abomination. This hotel.”

  “That doesn’t change what is right or wrong.”

  Tremor shrugged. “They say you ended up in jail for nothing. The laws are nothing. The police work for rich people. For white people. Didn’t matter what you did.”

  A line of perspiration formed at Professor Cleave’s hairline. “You can still control your thoughts and actions. You can keep your self-respect, even if you don’t respect—”

  “You think you control anything? They ask for peanuts, you give them peanuts. They ask for pineapple, you give them pineapple.”

  Professor Cleave slammed a locker door. “You have no direction. And no means of changing things, the way you’re going.”

  “I am changing things.” Tremor looked up from his phone. “One thing at a time.”

  “Let me tell you, the things you steal can never be yours. You carry them in secret. You can never be proud of them, because they belong to someone else. You elevate yourself through others’ labor and none of your own. That is an abomination.”