Professor Cleave’s fear that loneliness had corrupted his senses waxed and waned. At times, he dreaded the advent of madness. At others, he placed his faith in the soundness of his mind, duly recording our physical responses to different literary genres. Bound by the limits of speculation, he eventually conceded an inability to explain our behavior, contented himself with our ostensible gestures of interest, and nurtured hopes of someday delivering recitations to more sophisticated listeners.
“The lowest aspects of things always seduce the unschooled masses,” he declared when we disappeared down the drain during Sartre’s No Exit. “American cowboys and gunshots, I see, are your opiates.”
As if we needed a depressing play about three miserably contentious humans facing an eternity of imprisonment together in a tiny room! About humans’ inability to escape each other’s judgments! If humans want to spout “Solidarity Never,” to crave and then detest the company of others, who can blame us if we throw up our antennae and lament the strange ways of the world?
However frustrated by our inconstancy, Professor Cleave read aloud every night until the light went out. In darkness, he weighed the relative merits of literary interpretations, addressing his conclusions to those of us perched on the folds of his blanket. Then he whispered thanks to his daughter and thought of his wife more fondly than he ever would again.
Prison only added to Professor Cleave’s intellectual pedigree. The steady arrival of Irma’s packages established his reputation as an eccentric bibliophile.
“Why you always carrying those?” asked a terminal insomniac with speckled teeth. He pointed to the book in Professor Cleave’s hand. “Just words, words, words. Can’t lay down with words. Can’t eat words. Don’t your girl send things a man can use?”
“Black Jacobins is about the Haitian Revolution. A slave uprising that gave birth to a republic.”
“Nothing to do with us. Except it’s dead. Dead paper. Dead words.”
Professor Cleave extended the book. “You should read and digest it.”
Two days later, he found several pages of the book, slick with excrement, lying in the courtyard. After that, he concealed his intellectual endeavors from all but us, fearing that in his retreat from glue addicts, he was stepping ever closer to his own form of madness.
Twenty-nine months into his sentence, he stopped receiving packages from his daughter and violently creased letters from his wife. Professor Cleave—all of us—missed the former more than the latter. Cora had always confined her brief remarks to village scandals, recounted in the pithiest of terms, and to the weather, as if she and Professor Cleave no longer beheld the same sky. In her final missive, she stated without explanation that Irma had moved to New York.
From the moment the letter slipped from his fingertips, Professor Cleave underwent a metamorphosis. He picked at the pads of his fingers, as if he might slough off the sickness surrounding him. He paced with renewed intensity, as if he might keep the walls of his cell at bay. He reread well-worn books, fixating on their authors’ most trenchant observations and darkest insights into the human soul. He entertained desperate thoughts and held wandering conversations with himself. He might have fallen apart, if not for a storm of Biblical proportions that brought salvation, if only to Fort St. George’s inmates. Thirty-seven months into his prison tenure, news of an incoming hurricane began to circulate among the guards, and then the alternately glazed and animated convicts in the workshop.
“The storm will sweep everyone into the sea,” one hopeful sociopath said, struggling to affix a pirate flag to a plastic Spanish galleon. “Drown everyone.”
Professor Cleave stared at the sticky ejaculate drying at the tip of a metal tube in his hand, and that evening stood at his window and watched the sky darken.
“Maybe it’s good she went away.” He placed his fingers on the sill. We rose on our hind legs and peered through the grating. “She’ll have a life we never will.”
Thirty-six hours before landfall, he awoke to the sound of whistles. He dressed in darkness, and moments later fell into a line of inmates stumbling into the glare of spotlights. Surrounded by apprehensive, freshly deputized guards, he watched a cement truck dump sand in the center of the prison yard. He was leaning forward, hoping to glimpse a familiar face, when a guard pressed a shovel into his hand.
“By day’s end, there shouldn’t be a single bit of sand left in that pile.”
“Left of that pile,” Professor Cleave muttered as the guard moved down the line. “If there were no sand remaining, there would be no pile to call by the name.”
“No sandbags in Portsmouth,” the man beside him said. “They don’t have nothing ready.”
“They don’t have anything ready,” Professor Cleave stated. “The double negative suggests they have something ready.”
The befuddled huffer scratched his cheek, a whistle sounded, and the benighted citizens selected to save Portsmouth began shoveling sand into burlap sacks. At daybreak, the huffer held a crumpled tube beneath his nose and nodded at a new member of the bagging detail, a man in a stained jumpsuit and ankle chains.
“They let John Bowden out of the hole. Nobody but the body come from the hole once it goes in the third time. But they need hands now.”
Professor Cleave lowered his shovel and stared at the man in the stained jumpsuit. When John Bowden met his gaze, Professor Cleave turned back to the pile of sand before him. All afternoon, he listened to swells breaking against the cliffs below the prison and thought of Cora and his father.
As the wind gathered force, the smell of seaweed filled the air. The prison’s most cognitively addled addicts shoveled erratically and whistled through rotted teeth. Fearing the insidious creep of madness, Professor Cleave watched them in terror. That night, he suffered violent twitches that jerked him from the edge of sleep every few minutes. Anticipating flood surges in every drainpipe on the island, we hardly fared better.
He awoke the next morning with a dim sense of his surroundings. A sheet of cloud had obliterated the horizon. In the harbor, whitecaps formed beneath heavy drizzle and dying grey light. Professor Cleave was straining to see through the window grating when a siren sounded in the distance and the world outside vanished behind a wash of rain.
We emerged from the shadows beneath the sink, and he regarded us in the gloom. “Together, we are left to our own devices.”
As he spoke, torrential rain pounded the window. To the sound of screeching wind, he wrestled his mattress across the cell and propped it against the grate. When the glass beyond the grate shattered and the mattress toppled, he huddled beneath the sink, shivering to the sound of uninterrupted squalls while sideways rain pooled around his shriveled feet. Darkness became tangible and time lost all meaning until the next morning, when the wind abated and faint light appeared on the horizon.
Over the next few days, pools of water in the yard became reeking repositories of garbage and drowned rats. During rare musters, inmates with badly pruned feet exchanged news gleaned from the overheard conversations of guards.
“Prime Minister stole the emergency fund,” announced a thief riddled with tics. “Doing bad math for years. Left on the plane to Mexico when the first wind blew.”
In bits and pieces, Professor Cleave and his fellow convicts learned of food shortages and outbreaks of waterborne illnesses. As discredited cabinet members found asylum in Miami and San Paulo, guards resigned in rapid succession, fearing the rage of inmates confined to moldy cells. Those who remained did little more than deliver foil pouches of rations donated by humanitarian organizations. Professor Cleave spent his days in fever and delirium. We survived on streaks of multivitamin paste.
One month after the storm, Professor Cleave heard a key in his door. His head lolled sideways and he found himself facing Lyndon Buttskell in summer tweed, a silk cravat and impeccable leather shoes unsullied by the filth covering the floor. What an ass, we thought, flicking our antennae in Butts’s direction. That said, his suit was
stunning. He was, when all the votes were counted, one good-looking man.
“My good friend, I’m happy to see you again, even in such unpleasant surroundings.”
Professor Cleave lifted himself on an elbow and lowered his feet onto a mass of rotting pulp. “What are you doing here?”
“News travels slowly, I see. Last month’s mudslide set us up for last week’s landslide. Now, I’ve made it my mission to remedy the abuses of previous administrations.”
“The SDA? In office?”
“As prime minister, I intend to redress a gross miscarriage of justice.”
Professor Cleave rubbed his head. “Prime minister?”
“I’ve granted your pardon.”
“I’d rather appeal the verdict than accept a pardon.” Professor Cleave’s cheeks were hollow and his eyes sunken. We thought he’d finally gone mad.
“Different paths to the same destination,” Butts said with a wave of his hand. “This is no time for old fights about past injuries. This is a new day.”
On poached feet, Professor Cleave followed Little Butts into the yard and squinted into blinding sunlight, at a banner strung from coils of razor wire. “‘Reconciliation and Regeneration,’” he read. “‘The Social Democratic Alliance, an Alliance of All for the Future of Everyone.’”
“That, your cousin James wrote. We’ll have our photograph beneath it.”
As Butts’s arm slipped over his shoulder, Professor Cleave turned to face a dozen reporters clutching cameras, and in his filthy jumpsuit, became the dazed subject of a politically priceless photo.
That afternoon, he returned home in a manner befitting an expendable hero, in a taxi van shared with fourteen newly pardoned and politically apathetic addicts. He found Topsy sitting on the stoop, holding a newspaper.
“They said it might be today.” Topsy cast the newspaper aside. “They’re now saying you were put away for political expediency. Took this filthy rag three years to come to it.”
“Thirty-eight months,” Professor Cleave said.
Topsy struggled to his feet and gripped his son’s shoulder. “You look terrible. Worse than before.”
“I feel worse than before.” Professor Cleave’s breath caught. Fearing he might cry, he pulled away from Topsy and considered a pile of cigarette butts on the ground. “It looks like you’ve done a fair job minding my stoop.”
“I’ve been fixing things. Even houses up here felt the storm.” Topsy gestured to a heap of branches and warped boards in a corner of the yard.
Professor Cleave regarded an empty bottle lying in the grass. “Have you been keeping your health? You’ll be in the hospital with your carrying on.”
“Forget about me and look out for yourself. I hope you’ve had enough of your communism.”
“Those communists, as you call them, just gave me seven years of my life.”
“They gave you years that already belonged to you. Why wouldn’t they? They see a fool prepared to carry their signs.” Topsy patted his shirt pocket in search of cigarettes. “At least Butts had the sense to tone down his rhetoric, even if he sometimes still wears that Castro cap. Just like the other clown he followed around as an ass-sniffing pup.”
“He secured my release—”
“What did they do for you when it mattered?”
“You were in the courtroom—”
“And now I’m going down the road. The neighbors will want to know you’re back. I’ll give you time to settle into things.”
“Where is Cora?”
“The chapel. Her prayer book’s been glued to her hands. She does everything but sleep in church.”
“She was never one for church outside of Sunday.”
Topsy glanced at the house. “I’m glad to have you home.”
Little in the house had changed during his absence, Professor Cleave thought, at first. He stood beside a shelf and caressed the spines of his remaining books, marveled at rows of canned fruit in the pantry and the polished forks in the buffet. As he reacquainted himself with the house, though, he realized everything had changed. In his room, he found his clothes shrouded in plastic beneath the bed. A wedding portrait once on the nightstand was nowhere to be found. He turned to a mirror mounted above the dresser, and for an awful instant wondered if another man’s reflection had grown familiar to it.
He entered his daughter’s room and found comfort in the disheveled sheets hanging down one side of the bed. In a hopeful moment, he imagined Cora at night, finding refuge from loneliness in the memory and lingering scent of their absent daughter. Then he smelled the traces of rum rising from the sheets. Everything came into relief—the shapeless underwear strung over the back of a chair, his father’s Sunday suit dangling from a hook on the door, the stacks of newspapers against the wall, the dirty glass and tarnished UGG pin on the floor.
When Cora came home, he was sitting at the table, staring at his callused hands. He took in her appearance in one sweep. She’d lost too much weight and cut her hair, he observed, noting the tiny twist at the base of her neck. Her face had settled into an expression of permanent accusation that didn’t change when he rose from his chair and grazed the corner of her mouth with his lips.
“Why has he put his clothes in her room?” he asked.
Cora stiffened. “He’s been helping with things.”
“If he’s been trying to fix things, he’s only broken the place.”
“He helped out after she left. We had nothing, and there was no work. So she left. He knew I couldn’t ask her for money.”
“There’s no sense in this. How does he have any money with the way he drinks?”
“He sold his house. He lives here now.”
Professor Cleave fell back into his chair and placed his head in his hands. “And when she comes back, where will she live?”
Cora took a deep breath, and he lifted his eyes.
“She met someone. A Jamaican. They are living with his family. In New Jersey.”
“You let this happen in three years?” He pounded his fist on the table. “Where was your sense?”
Cora lifted her fingertips to the corner of her mouth, where his lips had brushed hers. “You don’t know what it was like. We lived the best way we knew.”
“This was your best?” He picked a cigarette butt off the floor and threw it on the table. “There’s nothing in your heads. Nothing but excuses echoing back and forth in emptiness.”
In that moment, a nearly unremitting silence settled between Professor Cleave and Cora. It remained so laden with mutual resentment that, in years to come, Professor Cleave even found occasional relief in Topsy’s commentary when he was at home, which wasn’t often. He spent every day driving his cab and every night mixing drinks. He suffered bouts of anxiety related not only to the impersonal aspects of his personal life, but to the disorienting effects of St. Anne’s rapid transformation. In the year following his release, billboards advertising new restaurants and spas at restored plantations appeared along the roads. Massive houses vacant for all but two months of the year sprawled over the southern half of the island. Little Butts, confidently poised and perfectly coiffed, led a ribbon-cutting ceremony at St. Anne’s first cruise ship terminal.
On the morning of the ceremony, Professor Cleave found his father sitting at the table, tugging a split sock over his heel. “You’re a strange sight up at this hour.”
“I’m going to the port. They say you wouldn’t believe the size of those ships. I suppose you’ll find fault in all of it, even though your man Butts can take credit. If this is his socialism, fair play to him, fool that he is.”
“This is anything but socialism.” Professor Cleave yanked a shirt over his shoulders.
“Your mother and Morris should have lived to see this. Generations of cane cutters and banana boxers should have seen it. Butts will ruin us, but not with houses and hotels.”
“What about the tax exemptions given to every foreigner?” In his distraction, Professor Cleave struggled t
o button his shirt. “They’ll want new roads. Electricity. Clean water. The burden will fall on those with the least.”
“You won’t complain making money driving them around.”
“No one’s complaining, but we need to take the long view of things.”
“Let me tell you, I knew a man who said good things come to those who wait. He died alone in bed the next day, with a full bottle of rum in his cupboard. That’s your long view. You must think I’m deaf as a stone and dumb as a goat.”
“It’s one-step chess playing,” Professor Cleave said. “Only a fool would do it.”
“You’re both fools,” Cora said from the kitchen doorway. “In that way, there’s not a bit of difference between you.”
Professor Cleave snatched his watch from the kitchen table and stormed from the house. In the cab, he listened to our patter as we spilled from the vents.
“You can talk sense to no one in that house. They’re like little children.” Halfway to Portsmouth, he parked on a gravel shoulder overlooking the harbor. “So, this is the future. This is what reconciliation and regeneration look like.”
We pressed against the windshield to observe an enormous white ship entering the harbor. We marveled at its massive hull and grew frenzied speculating on the output of its industrial kitchens.
“The minister of tourism says that, from now on, every citizen must do their patriotic duty and refrain from behavior that could tarnish St. Anne’s reputation.” Our antennae stiffened as Professor Cleave continued. “It hardly seems our six-legged citizens are up to the task of pleasing our new visitors. In lieu of erudition and proper manners, perhaps invisibility would be sufficient.”
Bristling, we turned our backs on him. He’d become distracted, anyway, by the ship dwarfing Portsmouth and spiting the soft landscape with its uniform decks.
“My father will find it a bit Stalinist. But he’ll never admit that.”
He looked down at a line of tiny boats along the shore and imagined their solitary captains, sinewy fishermen casting nets with callused hands, throwbacks to the past—and, like him, near strangers to the present.
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