The Pacific Room

by Michael Fitzgerald

  Lewis thanks him for his concern and moves on.

  He takes the slower path to the left, his eyes angling up through the foliage. Here he feels part of a larger variegated patterning of darkness and light. Even the tree trunks appear camouflaged, as is the trail ahead, which at times vanishes altogether behind clumps of mossy boulders and sly mountain turns. Soon the sky disappears, and he’s left with the impression of earth pressing infinitely upwards.

  He becomes sensitive to the flow of his body through space. Not so much climbing as swimming, though tougher on his calves. Up current he travels, over slippery overturned trees and rain-engorged puddles that appear more like lakes across which his body must paddle in a repeating pattern of stroke, breath, stroke, breath. Vailima, he remembers, means five rivers. Up here there’s more water than earth.

  The forest is never still. Pausing every now and then on his journey, Lewis thinks he can hear it growing, wrapping itself around his sentient body. Overhead a single birdcall unzips the space around him – the soft ooh-ooh-ooh ending in a rapid oo-oo. The blackest of lizards slithers at his feet.

  So when he turns a quiet corner of the mountain it’s as if his senses have already created the giant banyan tree looming there. He feels stilled by this thing that hovers in the mineral air, its roots as massive and tangled as a gothic cathedral. From one of its upper boughs a bird’s-nest fern explodes. It’s as if anything is plausible here in the forest; he feels both giant and dwarf.

  In these alternating shifts of slowness and swiftness Lewis proceeds; always in the back of his mind lies the thought that if he looks hard enough, he might catch the aitu.

  Chapter 32

  A SHIPWRECK OF LEAVES

  He wakes to the sound of no more rain. Out through the grime of the porthole he can see a single seagull swoop through the dimming sky. Soon darkness will fall, when the whole of the Pacific gives way to dreams of sea and sleep and slowness. But this is his time – the time he can move with sepia swiftness.

  The boat creaks as he walks – or rather, Henry moves within its water-warped spaces, a mouldy cavity his figure passes through. Up and out and he hardly needs to duck his head, so perfectly formed is he for this tiny space, and then he’s out on deck, the wedding-suited captain of the Nike 2.

  The deck is angled up, as if cresting a wave, so to get to the prow is like climbing a hill. As he begins to mount the deck he wonders if the weight of his body will bring it crashing down, to attain the precarious balance of a seesaw. But the boat doesn’t budge and he continues to teeter in midair.

  When he finally jumps down, the thud of the earth sends his body into shock. Landfall is always jarring like this, like waking from a vivid dream. It can leave him feeling flatfooted, this sudden meeting with the shore, ill-prepared as he is for a reality so unyielding, for a life not at sea.

  He looks up at the strangely distended hull, beached among a graveyard of boats just before the yacht club on the point. The Nike 2 had been shelter from the rain as the world receded back through curtains of water; his escape hatch.

  He stands barefoot on the sodden grass, swimming in his wedding suit. After nearly a day cradled in the bunk of the boat, and still wet from the rain, it’s even more ill-fitting than before, as if the man who wore it yesterday is not the man wearing it today; it’s the skin of his former self. He sails forth in his sagging seams.

  It had happened as simply as looking out the window. Yesterday at the altar he had stared up at Mount Vaea and felt it deep down – just as Teuila had promised the feeling would be. Instantly he knew. He knew the wedding was a mistake and that he must wend his way back to the thing he loved.

  Teuila had told him to stay in the moment: ‘focus so intently on what you want that all else falls away.’ All the faces in the church had blurred, a sea that had been miraculously parted by his will. It had cracked down the middle, this former reality of his life, and down it he had gratefully escaped.

  He can’t remember running, just slipping like water down a drain, falling to find its own level. From the church he had skimmed the food markets, moving within the shade of the umbrellas, past the pyramids of tobacco and taro roots wrenched rudely from the earth, with the cheese smell of breadfruit drying in the sun. Something like a rip had taken hold of him, for it felt more like swimming, and he didn’t struggle against the current.

  Which is how he had washed up at the bus depot by the harbour, each bus a brightly coloured boat of desire, a debris of words. Lurking between the Laumosooi Breeze and Lady Lanuvea he had found a reef of shadow as dark as his wedding suit. From there he had followed the grinning skull of Blue Machine through a whirl of exhaust smoke, and with it he had dispersed into the park beyond. Between him and the point, the peninsula was potholed with tombs and their memories, which merged with the long shadows cast by the trees. Like an arrow he took up only as much space as necessary as he swept along.

  He had almost reached the yacht club when he recognised the laughter of his high school friends Joe, Mr T and Leon – probably onto their third beers out on the deck. He couldn’t face them, not then, for in marrying Shema he would have also been marrying them. He couldn’t even begin to explain things to their unbelieving faces, so instinctive had his actions been. So he turned around, but he couldn’t go back to town. At that moment the Nike 2 offered herself up as a vessel to dream in, and sometime soon after that the world turned to water.

  From then until now he was suspended, but suspended in his medium. He is the hydrographer, after all: the plumber of ocean depths. If nothing else he knows how long to hold his breath and wait for the right moment to swim up and break the surface.

  It’s his time now, these last minutes before night, when shapes swim and surface. When Henry can assume the shape he wants to be. Down the peninsula he moves seamlessly in shadow. Slivers like a gecko. Slung like a spear.

  Past the yacht club now and he can hear the laughter from the deck – raucous and ribald – but this time he isn’t scared. With each step along the road he can feel that life being left behind, becoming smaller and smaller, insignificant in his slipstream.

  Above him a small plane twists in the sky, its buzzing growing fainter, as if draining the last of the sun. Soon nothing comes between him and the point except the house itself.

  The roar of the surf on the reef isn’t so distant now. Nor is the smell of the ocean. But this scent lingers with something closer at hand, of earth and roots and leaves. It’s a preposterous tangle, like a shipwreck of leaves, something both marooned here and cast adrift. What the house harbours he scarcely knows himself. It beckons like a buoy on the horizon, marking depth and distance, telescoping time.

  As a guide at Vailima, it had angered him how beholden they all were to Tusitala’s story – to the hand of history. As if their own lives didn’t matter. Now he longs for a future without a past and maybe not even a future, just a present, where nothing comes between them, between their bodies and breath. For at three o’clock in the morning he will tap on the window and let the fragrance of her garden in. This is all he wants. Wilhelmina.

  Chapter 33

  THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY

  The higher he gets, the lower his eyes train over the ground – first to the tiny green ants that race up the trunks of trees, as if the forest is made up of these tiny souls scurrying skyward. Then to the moss that seems to cover everything; he thinks, If I stop even a minute now to rest, it will cover me too like a blanket of snow.

  The higher he gets, the louder the humming in his ear. It goes on for several turns of the mountain until, through a sudden break in the canopy, he catches a glimpse of its source. It’s a small propeller plane calmly ascending the eddies of mountain air. Turning slowly on its side, it glows in the sky as bright as a sunspot.

  For a moment the sky opens up.

  A year after the crash, while doing his HSC, Lewis had watched the home-movie footage of the last moments of Air New Zealand Flight 901. There was a giddiness to the s
cene as heads gathered around windows, hair backlit by the blinding light of the snowy scene outside, the camera gliding with a giddy bounce. He’d imagined heaven to look like this.

  Somewhere unseen in the shadows were his mother, father and brother. In the days that followed he’d gone off to do his exams as planned, Aunt Agatha proffering a small white pill he later realised was Valium. All he remembers now is a summer of dreamless sleeps. He feels their loss like an absent limb.

  He slows, stopping in his muddy tracks. Reaching up to mop his brow, he realises he’s been crying.

  Was this what Wilhelmina was staring at so intently, looking to prise from his eyes?

  ‘Are you okay, Lewis?’ she had asked as they huddled together under the giant mango tree. ‘Are you comfortable with us?’

  It was the simplest, most direct question, but impossible to answer.

  ‘Do I look strange?’ he found himself responding.

  Her eyes took him in, in one long blink. ‘Let your mind relax,’ she said, ‘and let the stories in.’

  It dawns on him now how nothing remains buried forever.

  In his early twenties, with his hair and eyebrows dyed blue-black, he’d been discovered in the Dunedin Botanic Garden wearing one of Aunt Agatha’s thick woollen coats. It was a hot summer’s day and he was found hugging an old elm, the unnatural radiance of his face matching the electric blue of his aunt’s coat. To the cautiously approaching policeman he was heard to declare: ‘I want to kill my brother.’

  Lewis was put on lithium at first, turning his lurching frame into a mental mouse – at once everything about him began to contract and shake, bringing his field of view down to the size of a postage stamp. It was as if an earthquake had passed beneath his trembling hands and knees while all his attentions were fixed on this tiny invisible thing. He walked as if slowly travelling this fault line in his mind.

  After a year he was back in his university supervisor’s fluoro-lit office. He was now on a new medication which had the effect of plumping him up, greying his hair and manicuring his memories. His PhD supervisor – a pale, thin-lipped man who later died of a rare tropical disease in Mexico – suggested a change of tack. Nerli, it was decided. Yes, there was much work to be done on the painter Nerli.

  He thinks how the portrait is the very opposite of this vinetangled forest through which he dives, mud splashing his calves like paint. All this the writer’s room cannot contain.

  He thinks how, in this way, Nerli captured a perfect likeness: we are each defined by our opposite. It’s a strange relief knowing this as he continues his slow, imperceptible climb.

  Chapter 34

  NIGHT SONG

  The track ahead is submerged in darkness. For an outsider, there is no hint of what lies ahead, so inscrutable is the dense foliage. But Teuila has climbed Mount Vaea enough times to know that around the next bend or two the summit will reveal itself miraculously like an ocean giving way to an island, a solitary speck of space marked by the sign: Western Union Money Transfer.

  As she nears the top she doesn’t know what comes first – the song or the memory of the song. But as the dusk sky opens overhead, the lines of Sarah Vaughan come rushing to her.

  Where do you go, when you feel

  That your brain is on fire?

  Limned by the island’s outline, she and Henry had laid here, submerged in the yellow-green shadows of the breadfruit trees. It’s as if the mountain top has been designed for just two bodies at rest.

  Across the headstone they’d written their names, adding them to the other scrawls and scratchings over time, marking it like a tattoo.

  Where do you go, when you don’t even know

  What it is you desire?

  It’s like returning home: the whitewashed tomb carries the bluish hue of her night-time sheets. She hangs the duty-free bag in the trees and eases herself down. While the sun has tracked to the tops of the trees, the cement is still surprisingly warm. Stretching out, she can feel it along her spine, down through her legs. Only now does she notice the fine lacing of cuts, like an unfinished tattoo.

  Letting her hand spill over the chalky edge, she closes her eyes.

  She tries to think of nothing, and then wonders if such a thing is possible, preferring to slip into va, the space in between.

  She becomes aware of the distant sound of a plane. The sound grows louder and louder until she can feel its dark undercarriage pass over her, casting a cold shadow, as if she were underwater and looking up at the hull of a ship. Then as the sky erases all traces of it, she starts to sing.

  From behind her ear she takes the hibiscus and brings it up to her eyes, twirling the stem around in her fingers, casting everything in a warm reddish glow, and for a moment she imagines the scene as he approaches the peak, being drawn by this rosy light.

  As the night comes, and the town awakes,

  Sounds of children calling, and the squeal of brakes …

  It’s only when her lungs and diaphragm work in tandem, channelling the mountain air and transmitting it as song, that she feels truly alive: her heartbeat made manifest. And if songs are receptacles of breath, then teaching Henry to sing, with her prescribed notation of stops and starts, had bottled hers. All he has to do is open his mouth to release her.

  Music, but a lonely song,

  When you can’t help wondering:

  Where do I belong?

  Around her she can feel the wings of a flying fox stroke the air, coaxing the surrounding darkness, and for a moment she stops singing. Closer comes the rustle of breadfruit leaves, just behind her, and she cranes her neck around to see.

  She is both scared and fearless, holding the flower to her eyes. Her heart begins to race then steadies, scanning the trees with her eyes, staring so intently until a figure begins to emerge slowly from the shadow of leaves.

  There is no need to hurry, she thinks, as they have all the time in the world to declare themselves.

  As he leans in from the trees, her first instinct is to name him, so tall and silvery is the stranger, leaning towards the reflected light of the tomb. In his peacock-coloured shorts and German sandals he could be Caspar David Friedrich, she thinks, leaning in from the distance.

  Chapter 35

  THE BOTTLE IMP

  His fingers were never this pliant, Sosimo thinks. Always jabbing and darting or disappearing into the velvety folds of his coat. Never this soft, Sosimo thinks, as he weaves them together across the stillness of his master’s breast. Tinged by tobacco, they could be frangipani petals, a faint yellow yielding to white.

  It is only now with Tusitala resting in state, royally wrapped in siapo cloth, that the great hall seems finally finished. Everything was building up to this moment, Sosimo thinks. All that anguished race through time. The portrait. The flying cloud of fear. That is why all these characters had been assembled – wife, mother, stepson and stepdaughter – to hover in the wings like singers in an opera. They had been brought here by Tusitala to witness his death.

  Crammed into the one wagon, they had been hauled down the hill by the stepson this morning – telegrams to be tapped, steamer ships to be summoned, and a coffin of densely grained ifilele to be carved, heavier than water. So for the first time he can remember, at least since that time in the forest, Sosimo finds himself alone with his master.

  How easily the fingers thread together, all their energy spent, loosening. These same fingers that had twitched with life. He remembers the night they had cranked up the new phonograph player for the visit of the Italian painter, releasing Donizetti’s opera into the air.

  ‘Perhaps only an Italian can capture a Scottish spirit after all,’ Tusitala said.

  Sosimo remembers the unearthly sound of Lucia as she rained out from that gigantic brass horn, drenching them in the sadness of her story.

  Her voice had skidded, spun and swooped, crashing into the furniture, rising and falling like a bird caught in their midst. And his master had gone on to tell them the story of Luci
a di Lammermoor – how believing her lover to be dead, and forced into marriage, her free-falling soul had turned in on itself, piercing the very part of her that was always meant for him.

  It was that voice he had imagined hearing by the spring. It had the rush of the wind and the scale of a mountain, and it found its perfect vessel in Mary’s swooning figure on the rock. Like the Italian painter, he was drawn to the mute mystery of her, the suggestion of sadness in her long sloping shadow, and the triumph of her swift departure. And how her story would always remain here, peculiarly grafted to the place, like wild orchids tufting from the forked branches of trees.

  Now the teller of tales is spent, his eyelids untwitching, but still a story issues forth. As he threads the last of the fingers together, Sosimo realises he is humming Lucia’s song. This is not madness, he thinks. No, it is only with these brief pauses for death that life can go on.

  Standing up, he lets down his freshly limed hair. It is surprisingly long and tinged with red, dropping effortlessly to below his knees, brushing his pe‘amutu, his unfinished tattoo.

  The tattoo was begun years before, when Vailima was still Pineapple Cottage, a two-room shack by the creek, and his father had arranged his marriage to a girl from the local village, Malietoa’s daughter. But Sosimo quickly realised that this was not to be his fate. As he watched the tattoo slowly climb his calf, inking his soul, he felt the calling of his shadow self, someone born to serve and sing, to yield to softness. So when the Scottish writer and his American wife bought Pineapple Cottage, he would defy his father and conjoin, instead, with this double act, his un-inking tattoo but the sketch of an idea now abandoned.

  He has not spoken to his father since, such was the shame cast on his family for spurning the German-appointed high chief’s daughter. Some days he wonders if the war in the jungle is just a smokescreen – that if you took away the Germans and the Americans and their insatiable copra trade you would find that it is really about him. Sosimo.