Irregular Verbs

by Irregular Verbs

  Saufatu said nothing, concentrating on his strokes as he drew the man back to shore. He helped the man out onto the beach, watching him carefully to make sure he did not have any more water in his lungs, and then leaned him against a tree. Saufatu picked up his clothes from where he had left them, and the jug of toddy he had left there as well. He went back to the man, handed him the jug, and set to work tearing up his shirt into bandages for the wounds on the man’s leg. Luckily they were not deep, and had already been cleaned by the seawater; he was unlikely to carry them with him when he left.

  The man took a swig of toddy, and then another. “Thanks again,” the man said. “I’m Craig, by the way. Craig Kettner.”

  “Saufatu Pelesala,” Saufatu said. He glanced out at the sea. “We don’t get many visitors here.”

  “I can see that,” Craig said, “what with the welcoming committee and all. You really should put a sign up or something, warn people before they go swimming.”

  “It’s only instanced in that spot,” Saufatu said. “People know not to go there unless they want to experience it.”

  Craig frowned. “Why would they want to?”

  “It’s a memory. That’s where it happened.” He gestured out towards the sea. “Or so I’m told. Apisai Lotoala, he was one of the last people to grow up here—he was attacked by a shark right out there, so that’s where I put the memory.”

  “And that’s how he got out of it? By hitting the shark on the nose?”

  Saufatu shrugged. “That’s what he always said. All I know is, I’ve seen the scars.”

  Craig nodded slowly. “So—what is this place, anyway?”

  “You came here. Didn’t you know where you were going?”

  He shook his head. “I just picked it by random, pretty much. I look for . . . low-traffic sites. Mostly places that are basically empty, or abandoned. I didn’t expect anybody else to be here, to be honest with you.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “So—what is this place? Why are you encoding instanced shark attacks?”

  “This is my home,” Saufatu said. “The Eight Islands were very very low, too low when the waters rose. So my family was given the salanga of taking a record of them, as best we could.”

  Craig looked along the beach from left to right, his head nodding slightly. “And it’s all like this, full immersive dreaming?”

  Saufatu shook his head. “We were able to record some of the other islands immersively, but this one is mostly 2-D. I was able to convert some of it, like this beach, but the algorithms are expensive.”

  “What did you use?” Craig asked, crouching down and running his hand over the white, fine-grained sand appraisingly.

  “Extrapolator 7,” Saufatu said. “Price was an issue,” he added, shrugging slightly.

  “What about the shark attack? How did you record that?”

  “I build the instanced events myself based on stories people tell me, or records in the old newspapers.”

  “Why?” Craig broke into a grin, held up a hand. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “We do it to remember,” Saufatu said. “So there would be a record of our home.”

  Craig looked up and down the beach. “So where is everybody?”

  “They have their own lives,” Saufatu said. “They know it is here, and they tell me their stories to help build it.”

  “And who pays for it? This must all take up a lot of headspace.”

  Saufatu sighed. “There is some money. A fund—we had a lucky name, when they handed out the Web addresses, that other people wanted to buy. Of course most of it went to resettle our people, but there is enough left to do a little, for a little while.”

  Craig nodded. “Listen, I run this—it’s like a guide, to interesting places in the Web, places my scouts and I find that not too many people know about. I think people would be really interested in a place like this.”

  “I don’t know,” Saufatu said. “We never had many tourists, even when we were above water.”

  “But that’s just it. This place is real, you know, not just another dream with the same old tricks. If people were coming here you could maybe get funding from UNESCO, or the WikiHistory Foundation. Not just to keep the place going but make it better—emotion-encode the events, get custom algorithms.” He took a breath, shook his head. “Listen, just think about it. If you decide you’re interested, let me know.”

  Craig held out his right hand, and after a moment Saufatu took it: Craig’s PID crossed the handshake, to be logged in Saufatu’s terminal. Then Craig gave a small wave, and turned to walk back to the entry portal at the edge of the beach; Saufatu waited until he had gone, and then woke up.

  Losi was already gone when Saufatu emerged from his room, so he boiled a kipper, cut it out of the plastic and put it on his plate next to a half-can of pulaka. They had been close when she had been younger—mother-uncles and sister-nieces typically were, compared to the more formal relationships between parents and children and the taboo on cousins mixing—but since she had entered her teens she spent nearly all her time in her room or out of the house.

  When he went outside he saw that she had left the truck. That was good for him, since it meant he didn’t have to face the long bus ride from Waitakere down to his shift at the Auckland airport, but he couldn’t help wondering who she had caught a ride with. He sent her a text, offering to pick her up when his shift was done, then got into the truck.

  Traffic was worse than usual that morning, spreading out from downtown as far as the Mangere Bridge. It was still faster than the bus, though, and he had time for a coffee-and-toddy with a gang of the other Islanders before his shift started. There were maybe a dozen of them who worked at the airport, though the precise numbers shifted fairly often. Mostly they talked about nothing—work and fishing and the kilikiti matches—and sometimes, when Saufatu closed his eyes, he almost felt the water around him, like they were all standing hip-deep in the Funafala lagoon.

  They all finished their coffee before it began to get cold and queued up at the security check. Saufatu’s heart sank when he saw a new officer at the security kiosk, and he moved ahead of the others. When he got to the kiosk he took out his DP card and held it out.

  The security guard, a ruddy-faced man in his twenties with buzz-cut hair, squinted at the card. Finally he shook his head. “Refugee card’s not ID,” he said.

  “I’m not a refugee, it’s a displaced persons card,” Saufatu said. He jerked his head to indicate the row of islanders behind him. “We all have them.”

  The guard frowned. “I have to call this in,” he said. He picked up his phone and dialled it carefully, keeping a close watch on Saufatu as he whispered urgently to whoever was at the other end of the line.

  Saufatu sighed. It was like this every time someone new came on at the security desk. There were more Islanders living in Auckland than anywhere else in the world, but they were still just a drop in a tremendous bucket. The city was home to thousands of migrants from all across the Pacific, all there for different reasons: guest workers on visas, refugees from the political violence on Tonga and Fiji, second- and third-generation residents and citizens, native Maori, and people like him, whom the UN had provisionally declared Displaced Persons.

  Finally the guard put down his telephone and waved Saufatu through. The other islanders followed slowly, as the guard took each one’s DP card and scrutinized it carefully before letting him pass. When they were all through Saufatu headed towards the baggage terminal, noticing when he saw the Arrivals board that he was fully ten minutes late for his shift—half an hour’s pay gone thanks to the new man at the security desk. He kept his pace up all morning, so that by noon he was ahead of schedule and could take a few minutes to watch the planes take off.

  That was how he had gotten into the business: as a boy he had watched the flights that landed and took off from Funafuti’s airstrip ever
y day, watching the planes get smaller and smaller until they looked like frigate birds. Even when he was grown and working at the tiny airport he would sometimes think about flying away on one, visiting all of the places he had seen in the travel magazines visitors left behind. When the time finally came for everyone to leave, though, the airstrip was under water and they all went on old freighters that stank like septic pits and crawled like snails across the ocean. Then, when his sister and brother-in-law had left Auckland to join the Extraterritorial Government in New York, he had stayed to carry out the family’s salanga, gathering stories and memories from the expats to build the virtual islands. Only Losi, just ten at the time, had stayed with him: “The surfing sucks in New York,” she had said.

  She was surfing when he came to pick her up, off a beach in Maori Bay that was studded with black volcanic rock. The road ended at the beach, no parking lot, so he just set the parking brake and leaned out the door, watching as she rode her board into the oncoming breakers, a little bit differently each time—hitting the waves a bit higher or lower, cutting left or right once she was riding a swell. It didn’t look much like fun to him, but perhaps the fun part had been earlier in the day. The sun was low on the horizon behind her, and as it turned to red Saufatu began to get a headache; finally he honked the truck’s horn, twice, and a few minutes after that he could see her paddling her board back to shore.

  Once Losi was out of the water she unzipped her wetsuit, peeled it off and rolled it into a messy ball. She stood on the beach in her black one-piece as a man with knee-length shorts and a ball-cap came to meet her; she reached up to the back of her neck, detached the recording module from her ’jack and handed it to him. The man touched his pico to the module, downloading everything she had experienced that day so it could be cut up in bits, stripped to pure sensation and plugged into surfing dreams.

  A blond-haired boy wearing a wetsuit that was unzipped to the waist came up and gave Losi a hug; she leaned close to say something to him, said goodbyes to all the other Kiwis crowded around them and then finally gave a wave to Saufatu and started towards the truck.

  “Good day?” he asked as she climbed into the truck, shoving her crumpled wetsuit under her seat.

  She shrugged. “Caught some good waves this morning.”

  Saufatu started the truck, shifted gears and worked at getting it turned around. He noticed a long scrape down her left shoulder. “Looks more like they caught you.”

  “I spent a little time up at the north end of the beach, getting knocked into the rocks.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Someone’s gotta do it.”

  “I didn’t see that white boy doing it,” he said, looking straight ahead.

  She laughed. “Are you kidding? He got bashed twice as hard.”

  “If you say so.” Saufatu was quiet for a few moments, watching for the turn back to the highway from Muriwai Road. “That reminds me, I met a fella last night who made me think of you—he was out swimming and ran into Apisai Lotoala’s shark attack.”

  “What, a tourist?”

  “Not exactly, I don’t think. He said he goes looking for low-traffic places—his name was Craig Kemper, I think. Heard of him?”

  She shook her head, then stopped. “Wait. Craig Kettner?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s it.”

  “How can you not know who that is?” Losi asked. “What was he doing in the Islands, anyway?”

  Saufatu shrugged. “He said people would like to visit them. Do a lot of people follow him?”

  “Enough to crash your server,” she said. “God, I can’t believe you sometimes.”

  “Well, he asked to see the rest of the Islands—you can come if you want, show him yourself.”

  She nodded slowly—trying, he could tell, to stay cool. “All right,” she said, and smiled.

  There was a fatele that night, just a small one, in Donald Tuatu’s backyard. Saufatu went over after supper, filled a plastic coconut-half from the bowl of toddy and inched around the periphery of the party. There were no singers, just an old boom box, but a few teenage boys were dancing out the lyrics, two from one side of their “village” squaring off against three from the other.

  Saufatu spotted Apisai Lotoala sitting nearby, filled up another coconut half and headed towards him. He was a big man, still powerfully built despite his age, and the old folding chair he was sitting on buckled beneath him. He was wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and the scars on his leg shone white in the moonlight.

  “Here,” Saufatu said, carefully handing him the coconut shell. “You looked dry.”

  Apisai drained the shell he was holding, set it on the ground and took Saufatu’s. “Ta,” he said, and tipped it back.

  “Fella ran into your shark last night.”

  “Oh? What’d he do that for?”

  Saufatu shook his head. “Didn’t know it was there. He’s not an Islander—American, I think.”

  “He get out all right?”

  “Sure. I told him to bop it on the nose, just like you did.” Saufatu took a drink of his toddy. “Look, I may be getting a chance to upgrade the Islands some. I’m going to need you to help me fill in Niulakiti.”

  Apisai shook his head. “I told you everything I can remember. I wasn’t there long, you know—off on a freighter at sixteen, like all my mates. Ask me about that, I could talk all day.”

  “Saufatu!” Apisai’s wife Margaret had spotted them talking and now came over. She was almost as tall as he was and wore a flower-print dress that fell in straight lines from her shoulders to her ankles. “Saufatu, where is that niece of yours? I haven’t seen her in years, it feels like.”

  “She turned in early,” Saufatu said. He tapped the back of his neck. “She surfs—records how it feels, they sell it to the dreamcasters. A whole day of it tires her out.”

  “But how is she going to meet a boy?” Margaret asked. “You know the ones her age, they’re all getting jobs, in the city or on the ships.” She turned to her husband. “She’s so busy, we’re going to have to find her someone nice. Can you think of anyone?”

  “Leave me out of this,” Apisai said.

  “She’s coming with me to the Islands tomorrow night,” Saufatu said. “You can come too, if you like. I mean, you can come anytime—it’s all for you.”

  “Oh, Saufatu, I don’t know how you have the energy for those dreams,” Margaret said. “You must have it very easy at the airport. I have to be up at five to go and clean my houses.”

  Saufatu turned to Apisai, who had been retired for nearly a decade now. “Well?”

  Apisai shrugged and took another drink of his toddy.

  Before going to bed Saufatu sent Kettner a text, suggesting they meet again the next night. He disabled the realtime lock and then went from island to island, planning the tour he would give to Kettner and Losi.

  To his surprise, Losi was still there when he got up: even more surprising she was in the kitchen, boiling a bag of kippers and heating a bowl of pulaka in the microwave. “Good morning,” she said, putting a plate and fork down as he sat at the table.

  “Good morning.”

  If Losi noticed his bemusement, she showed no sign of it; instead she pulled the bag out of the boiling water with tongs, cut it open and slid the reddish fish onto his plate, getting to the microwave just as it began to beep. “How was your night?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Saufatu said. He flaked off a piece of kipper with his fork and chewed it slowly. “Fine. Thank you.”

  She spooned a pile of hot pulaka onto his plate. “Have you heard from Craig Kettner?”

  Saufatu shook his head. “Not in the night. I haven’t checked my texts this morning, though.” He took another bite of the salty fish, chewed it thoughtfully. “Do you need a ride this morning?”

  “Are you sure you have time?”

  He nodded. “Sure. Just let me finis
h up and let’s go.”

  “Sure.” She smiled, then turned to put the empty bowl of pulaka in the sink. “Do you have time to check your texts first?”

  Luckily she was recording at Karekare Beach that day, a bit nearer to home than where he had picked her up the day before; luckier still the regular security guard was back on duty and waved him right through, so that he was only twenty minutes late and short an hour’s pay. He checked his texts before starting work and found one from Kettner, agreeing to meet him on the Islands that night (though of course it would be morning for Kettner, if he lived in America). After that the day went quickly, his mind barely registering the bags he moved from plane to carousel as he rehearsed the tour he had planned.

  When his shift was done he picked Losi up from the beach, smiled at the way her eyes lit up when he told her about the text from Kettner; she was nearly bouncing in her seat the whole ride home, and throughout supper she pressed him for details on his first meeting with Kettner. Finally it was time to hook up their dreamlinks and go to sleep; after the usual moment of wild dreaming the REM regulator kicked in and they both found themselves on the pink sand at the tip of Funafala, the narrowest inhabited island in the Funafuti group, where they could see both the lagoon and the western islands and east to the open sea. It was also home to the village where he had grown up, and most of the landscape was drawn from his own childhood memories: thick stands of coconut trees, huts with thatched or sheet-metal roofs; and the wrecks of small boats that he and his friends had used as forts and playhouses. Kettner was already there, looking at a pair of small wooden boats, with outboard motors and canvas soft tops, that had been pulled up onto the beach.

  Saufatu waved to him, took Losi by the hand and led her over to the boats. “Craig, thank you for coming. This is my sister-niece Losi—she does dream work, too.”

  “Really?” Kettner said. “What do you do?”

  Losi shrugged dismissively. “I’m a recorder—we just do B-roll, you know, generic surfing stuff, but Brian—that’s the guy I work with—he’s an indie dreamcaster. Whenever we have enough time and money we record some more.”