The Wonder That Was Ours

by Alice Hatcher

  By then, dozens of hotel guests had congregated around the pool to escape the claustrophobia of their rooms, and to comment on the missing passengers and the posthumous fates of those who’d succumbed to illness. For fear of the contagion’s spread, the dead had been consigned to the Celeste’s meat lockers. Under the onslaught of dreadful news, the Ambassador’s guests traded their fragile sympathies for the secret jubilation of survivors. Unwilling witnesses to misery, they engaged in strange psychological feints to justify their good fortune. Helen was the sole exception. She leafed through a magazine filled with photos of celebrity rehab graduates and let her attentions drift between indistinguishable starlets, the sutures poking through her sweater, and the conversation of two men sprawled on nearby deck chairs.

  “Things must be quite desperate if they’re jumping,” observed a finely wrinkled Englishman. Beside him, an American balanced a sweating beer can on the rise of his stomach.

  “Or they’re really stupid. I heard those assholes jumped with their shoes on. Doesn’t matter. You’d be busted up hitting the water from that height. Wouldn’t have a chance to drown.”

  “All around, it’s terrible luck.”

  “Nothing to do with luck. Dumber than dog shit.”

  “One wonders if they’ll wash up at some point,” the Englishman mused.

  “Better if they don’t. Who knows how long this thing lives in its host?”

  “It’s the end of our snorkeling plans, though we’d certainly negotiate a good price now.”

  The American scanned the harbor with a pair of binoculars. “That garbage piled on the decks must smell like shit. Don’t know how they can keep people locked in their rooms. No need to impose martial law just because a few jackasses cashed their chips.”

  “The only person worse than the captain is this Buttskell character,” the Englishman said. “A bit of a fascist, from the sounds of it.”

  “Ought to be strung up from a tree.”

  “Loathe as I am to admit it, I’m relieved they’re not transporting passengers to the hospital here. It would be absolutely mad.”

  “But shooting at people, stupid fucks or not, wasn’t right.”

  “I entirely agree. It’s a police state.”

  “Might as well bunker down and drink.” The American opened another can of beer and cursed. Flecking foam from his chest, he followed the Englishman’s gaze to a young woman staring at the sun through mirrored glasses. “Keep it in your trunks, pal. She can’t be more than sixteen. They lock you up for that shit.”

  “If there’s grass on the field, play ball. Isn’t that an American expression?” Even our jaded antennae twisted, and we pitied those humans fated, like us, to suffer fools. The Englishman inclined his head toward Helen. “I hope we haven’t disturbed you with unpleasant talk.”

  “You should lose the sweater,” the American said. “It’s hotter than hell, in case no one told you.”

  “It is hell.” Helen tossed the magazine to the ground and rose from her chair.

  She entered the lobby with no particular destination in mind. She thought of leaving the hotel and walking until she grew too exhausted to think, but then there would be the severity of strangers’ stares, clinging dust, and the suck of liquefying asphalt beneath her blistered feet. She slumped against the wall beside the elevator, stared at a crack in the plaster and dreamed of slipping into some dark space. All she could do, she thought, was retreat to her room and wait, or turn herself over to some authority. She drifted in indecision and tried to focus her thoughts.

  She was staring at a baseboard when Professor Cleave found her looking as withered as the potted palm beside her. His mood had deteriorated over long hours trolling the streets, and her unseasonable sweater seemed, more than ever, suggestive of some hidden illness. He looked around the empty lobby and approached her.

  “You understand the gravity of the current situation, so you should understand why I need to ask about your health.”

  She drew away from the wall. “My health?”

  “People here are very anxious. With your talk of the ship two nights ago, I have every reason to be concerned. You spoke of an infirmary. And you look ill.”

  “You have no right to talk about my appearance.”

  He pointed at her face. “Everyone talks about rights when they want to justify some selfish concern. It’s not your right to endanger so many others.”

  Helen summoned the elevator. “Then you have no business.”

  “It is exactly my business. I went home to my wife and father last night, and I could offer them no assurances. You saw things on that ship. You were irresponsible to come here.”

  “Hundreds of people left the terminal. We weren’t the only ones.”

  “But you walked everywhere, knowing what you did. You rode in my cab.” He took in Helen’s ragged hems and the button dangling from a frayed thread. “They say the infection causes chills. If you’re sick, you should have kept to yourself. You and the man you’re with.”

  The elevator opened, and Helen backed across its threshold. “I have no reason to think I’m sick.”

  He blocked the door with his foot. “You’ve been selfish. Playing with the lives of so many people.”

  Helen looked down at his foot, baffled. “Suicide’s not contagious,” she said.

  He thought he’d misheard her until she pulled up one of her sleeves, extended her upturned arm, and repeated her words. She withdrew to a corner of the elevator and pressed her arm against her chest. He staggered backward, and when the elevator doors closed, he collapsed on a couch. He tried to hold onto the image of her arm, now a strange source of hope, and retain what he could of an exchange too strange to fix in his mind. She’d seemed surprised by her own actions, more ashamed than hostile, and more exhausted than indifferent. Still, he felt no less angry for knowing what she’d done to herself.

  He bent over a newspaper on the table before him. Beneath a full-page photo of the Celeste, a tiny inset referenced a murder in Tindertown. He looked into the lounge, at a group of tourists watching television. Then he tucked the paper beneath his arm and walked to the elevator, realizing how much he needed to be alone, and realizing, too, that the last time he’d gone to the roof to read, he’d raced up eight flights of stairs without once losing his breath.

  He found Tremor staring down at the water. He expected to feel renewed anger but felt himself deflating instead. If a little closer to the edge, the boy was sitting where he’d sat years ago, when he’d let his thoughts wander beyond the horizon, to places he’d mapped a thousand times in his mind. The boy, though, had come up in a different world, one filled with new strains of sickness, strange storms, and unpredictable droughts. When Professor Cleave stepped up to the roof’s edge, Tremor considered him through narrowed eyes and then turned away.

  Professor Cleave unfolded the newspaper. “Jumping when they have so much. At the first sign of problems.”

  Tremor looked up again, stirred by the depth and direction of Professor Cleave’s anger. Together they watched a solitary figure walking along the shore.

  Professor Cleave struggled to find words. “With this quarantine, there will be lean days ahead.”

  “Whole island’s Rocky Point, now. Nothing different for most people I know.”

  “This sickness could change everything.”

  Tremor picked at the edge of a plastic card in his hands. “How does it spread? By touching?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does it move through the air? In the breath of sick people?”

  “That’s of no matter to us,” Professor Cleave said. “We have no choice but to breathe.”

  “Will the water make people sick?”

  “No one is certain.”

  “How long are they sick before they show it?”

  “They don’t know. About the incubation period.”

  Tremor twisted sideways to look at Professor Cleave. “Doesn’t the paper say?”

  �
�If you want to know what they know, go on and read it.” Professor Cleave folded the newspaper and tossed it to the ground beside Tremor.

  Tremor drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around his shins. His face had become a register of fear and confusion. “If no one knows anything, they should let them drown. Shoot any that don’t.”

  Professor Cleave thought of Helen’s sunken eyes and tried to stir his own conscience. “Then they’ll be guilty, too.”

  “People say we’ll all get it in a few days. They brought it here.”

  “They might not have known.”

  “They were in your taxi. You touched their glasses. I carried her bags.” Tremor placed the card on top of the newspaper. “I brought him a towel.”

  Professor Cleave looked at Dave’s employee badge and rested his fingertip on his upper lip to steady his expression. “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No woman will touch me if I’m sick.”

  “You’re getting beyond the situation. We don’t know anything.”

  “Is that why you aren’t telling anyone?”

  “I didn’t know anything.” Professor Cleave faltered. “When I picked them up.”

  Tremor trailed his fingers along his arm. “I should kill them myself.”

  Professor Cleave looked out at the Celeste and realized that Helen’s features and those of another woman had become indistinguishable in his mind. “We need to refuse violence, or we become morally deformed.”

  Tremor lowered his head between his arms, and Professor Cleave knew he’d stretched his meaning over too many syllables. He struggled, in vain, to clarify his thoughts, and then left Tremor sitting on the edge of the roof. Standing behind the bar, he imagined Tremor recoiling from words swimming on newsprint and looking out, in fear, at an unforgiving world. He felt that same fear nesting in his chest and making it difficult to breathe.

  At the end of the night, he carried a sack of garbage to the loading dock, where feral cats were fighting over scraps of food. He stamped his foot, and the cats scattered beyond the light falling past the open kitchen door. As he turned to the dumpster, he saw a white uniform shirt floating in darkness. He slowly discerned the shape of Tremor standing near the entrance to the service stairwell.

  “What are you doing in the dark? Passing the time, I suppose.”

  “Killing it. That’s what Americans say. Nothing to do.”

  “You can help me get rid of this garbage.”

  Tremor sauntered to the dumpster and propped open its lid while Professor Cleave tossed the bag onto a bed of decomposing lettuce.

  “Shut that thing now or we’ll both suffocate,” Professor Cleave said. “Their mountains of garbage never stop piling up.”

  “Things they don’t eat,” Tremor said. “Things they won’t eat.”

  “We’ll hope it passes soon. The heat. The sickness. The whole miserable lot of them.” Professor Cleave wiped his hand on his pants.

  “You’re afraid you got the American disease.” Tremor pulled a lighter from his pocket. Tendons rippled beneath his skin each time he batted its flame with his fingertips. “I’m burning it away.” Tremor spat on his fingertips and held them to the flame again. Professor Cleave recoiled from the sizzle of saliva.

  “That won’t do a thing. It’s foolish.”

  “You said they don’t know anything. So, you don’t know anything. You just pretend to know things.”

  Professor Cleave studied Tremor’s expression in the flickering light. “You’re clouded, again. Wasting time in stairwells. Do you think you don’t need a job?”

  “The job pays enough for the bus to get to the job.”

  “You make money for more than the bus by doing everything but your job. Sneaking around rooms. And then you take a paycheck for the job you don’t do. You steal in different ways, and they’re all the same in the end.”

  “I’m not working in this place until I’m an old man.”

  Professor Cleave pressed his fingernails into his palm. “What you think about this place is no excuse for thieving and lying. And the manager is no matter. At the end of each day, you answer to your conscience. It’s all you have.”

  “That’s all you have if you’re the manager’s nigger.” Tremor brushed past Professor Cleave and slipped through the gate.

  Professor Cleave spent several minutes in the company of feral cats, rubbing his hands where they’d become sticky and trying to compose himself. He felt gutted and frail, and for the first time, afraid of Tremor. He stepped out onto the sidewalk, looked over his shoulder once, and berated himself for doing so. At the corner, a man holding a bloody shirt staggered across the street.

  “No work tomorrow,” the man slurred, weaving through a streetlight’s orange glow. “A carnival without the cruise.”

  Professor Cleave watched him disappear and started walking to the sound of a woman cursing in the distance. He didn’t slow his pace until he reached his cab. He didn’t lower his windows until he reached the edge of Portsmouth.

  Stirred by warm currents, we emerged from beneath the seats and gathered on the dashboard to view the harbor. We recoiled momentarily from the lurid lights of helicopters and then fluttered our wings, intoxicated against all reason by hints of garbage.

  “A fetid feast for the less fastidious.” Professor Cleave reached for the radio and then drew his hand back to the steering wheel. “Nothing will have changed, except for the worse.”

  As the harbor receded, he wondered if exhaustion had finally rendered his senses unreliable. He shuddered at the sight of crooked headstones in neglected cemeteries, chipped grey teeth rising from rot, stray dogs with gleaming fangs and goats with mirror eyes glinting in headlights, riotous roadside weeds and brooding volcanic mountains—features of a familiar landscape made nightmarish by the news of the day.

  Professor Cleave wasn’t alone in seeing the nightmarish aspect of things. Those of us crawling through the gutters of Portsmouth had grown disoriented, overpowered by tantalizing scents of decay inseparable from the suffering of our peers. We felt addled, too, by static—the erratic thoughts of Tremor in the throes of self-hatred, more confused than ever as he tried to find his way beneath once-familiar constellations muted by the glare coming off the harbor.

  Tremor had set off in the direction of Portsmouth, too sickened to think of anything but flight. He didn’t even stop to trade his stiff uniform for the clothes he’d stored in a basement locker, or to respond to the garbled comments of a drunk stumbling up the hill, slurring about the American disease and pointing at his starched shirt. He might have bloodied the man’s face, but the man’s smell, the infectious reek of a parasite rooting in dumpsters, repulsed him. He felt the sticky residue of something he’d touched and stumbled down the sidewalk with gravity tugging at his chest until he felt he was falling.

  At the bottom of the hill, he pressed his palm to his forehead, dizzied by the pounding of helicopter blades, the spotlights sweeping the harbor for broken bodies, and the smell of rot. He’d heard rumors of garbage piled on upper decks, falling into the sea in small avalanches. All of it would wash up somewhere, much of it in Rocky Point.

  He leaned against a wall to steady himself, sick at the memory of six letters he’d spit at a man wearing the same uniform clinging to his own back. He’d used the word to resist the deadly undertow of hours slipping away, hours that could become a lifetime spent skimming litter from swimming pools. If he’d left Professor Cleave looking like a slack-jawed old man broken by a single blow, he reasoned, he’d saved himself by renouncing servitude in the most unqualified terms he could conjure. Now he wanted to disappear in a crowded, smoke-filled room and forget the rotted core of each losing argument with himself. He started in the direction of EZ’s apartment, alert to the sounds of bottles clattering somewhere. The streetlight’s hum merged in his imagination with the buzz of graveyard flies, and he scratched his face to dispel his sense of tiny insects tracing patterns across his cheeks.

  He sl
owly gained an awareness of warmth spreading across his shoulder blades, the retaining wall at his back and the sidewalk beneath his fingertips. He reached around his ribcage and felt torn fabric and fresh blood, examined his teeth, and felt his head for lumps. Then he pulled himself to his feet and paced in short turns to restore feeling to his legs, sensing that something inside of him had broken. He reached for his phone, thinking to call someone, and realized he had no name for himself. He tried to will himself into being by speaking, to remember the sound of others speaking his name, and heard nothing.

  Panicked, he started down the street. In the center of town, he boarded a crowded taxi van to escape the malevolence he’d unleashed. He turned to the window and stared at his dim reflection, peering into the pools of darkness around his eyes until his name returned, six sequenced letters to exorcise the six he’d spat in a man’s face earlier that night. Tremor, he whispered over and over, oblivious to the exhausted maid sitting beside him.

  He wanted, more than anything, to reach home. He paused on the last word, circled it warily, and dwelled upon its bewildering associations. He wanted to lose himself in predictable routines among people too addled to judge. Among broken people, he told himself, he could live with himself. He leaned back in his seat, indifferent to worsening radio reports of contagion and impending economic downturn. If the world could recede from his mind without warning, none of it mattered, he thought.

  When the bus left him beside the road, he went to his garden. He stripped his shirt from his back and dropped to his knees. He touched the crusted blood at the base of his spine and then buried his fingers in earth to cleanse them. He inhaled deeply and let his eyes slip out of focus. The moon waxed and melted. Tremor, he whispered.

  Before daybreak, he made his way into Rocky Point, tripping over exposed roots and alive to every sensation—the touch of overhanging branches scratching his bare shoulders, the sound of a turning tide and the taste of salty air. He looked at the trailers and shacks lining a narrow road, the brooding shapes of tethered boats, and the scales of reflected moonlight upon the sea. He quickened his pace when he passed Mary’s reliquary, determined to return home, to the smell of cane liquor and the stirring of his father in the throes of alcoholic dreams.