by Cole Alpaugh
Dante had raced in the shadow of the Matterhorn at least a dozen times, on the Zermatt race slopes in the Europa Cup competitions. The Europa Cups were where young racers lowered their points with the hope of promotion within their country’s team, making the next step onto the World Cup stage. In fact, the race that had killed Dante for about five minutes was a mere sixty kilometers from the iconic Swiss peak. Had he been conscious, he would have enjoyed a marvelous view from the medevac helicopter whisking him to the trauma center.
“Welcome to the Cook Islands!” read a giant canvas sign spread across the glass walls of the terminal building. Dante shouldered his two stuffed backpacks and followed a sleepy group of red-eye travelers toward the doors marked for arrivals. His long legs were shaky from being crammed behind three subsequent airplane seats for nearly nineteen hours. Despite having emerged from a vegetative state just a few weeks earlier, Dante had rebuilt a good deal of his coordination and a fair amount of muscle. Still wobbly, he dealt with chronic headaches and felt winded and nauseated after basic physical activity. But his strength would come back, the doctors said. Not all of it, since he was forbidden to engage in stressful or high-impact workouts, but enough to lose the constant sense of frailty.
“You might live to be a hundred, or you could die tomorrow from one solid jolt to your brain,” his twice weekly therapist told him. “Setting off on such a long trip away from medical care is suicidal. I’m half temped to commit you to the psych ward just to give you an opportunity to understand that this is fantasy. This obsession is a leftover dream your damaged brain has accepted as reality.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he’d said.
Jennifer had delivered his backpacks stuffed with clothes, along with his passport and a receipt for electronic plane tickets. One of the backpacks contained plastic bags filled with fifty dollar bills, which she’d warned might raise eyebrows at airport security. Dante figured the truth would be enough. He would just explain that he was taking everything he owned with him.
“Yes, I know you’re leaving.” The therapist had expressed his frustration and disapproval with a great exhale of exasperation. He wore a name tag containing many letters jumbled in a way that may or may not have been another symptom of Dante’s confusing new language difficulties. It was also possible that the brown-skinned doctor really did have a difficult foreign name. Dante was reasonably certain his brain was capable of masking or altering voices, since he’d recently listened to a television news anchor who sounded exactly like a young girl.
Curiosity finally got the better of him. “How do you say that?” Dante asked, pointing at the name tag.
“How do you say what?”
“How do you say your name?” Dante pointed again at the pin on the man’s white lab coat. “How is it pronounced?”
“Are you serious?” he’d asked, and then realized the former ski racer was deadly serious. “It reads ‘Alex Jones, DPT.’ The DPT stands for Doctor of Physical Therapy. But that’s not how you’re seeing it, is it?”
“Jesus.” Dante buried his face in his hands.
“And it is my professional opinion, based on years of experience with traumatic brain injuries, that you will be killing yourself should you pursue this wild goose chase.”
“Everyone tells me I’ve been a ski racer since I was a little kid, Doc.” Dante sat in a chair next to his bed, getting used to the feeling of jeans and a button down shirt. The last place he wanted to be was in that damned bed. It had come to feel like a coffin, smelled like death. He’d spent the last two nights sleeping in the old vinyl visitors’ chair, despite how stiff it left him in the morning. “Not exactly an option to go back to, huh?”
“No it isn’t, but you have plenty of other options. You have access to an occupational therapist and there’s a very nice community college not far from where you live.”
“I moved out. My stuff is all sold and my lease is broken.”
“Nevertheless, running off is the worst possible decision.” The therapist stood over him, chart open, reminding Dante of a cop on a reality show he’d watched with the other residents. The officer had explained that standing over a suspect reinforced the image of authority.
“It was explained to me that I have a tenth grade education.” Dante felt the warm flush of anger returning. “And that doesn’t mean shit because of how much was erased. I ask to pass the salt and they look at me like I’m from outer space. The salt, I say, pass the fucking salt! And then they all get up from the table, move away from the crazy fucker who’s screaming about rabid cats. And there I am, some babbling moron sitting alone, staring across the table at a salt shaker. Yeah, great life, Doc, exactly how I imagined it would be.”
“Your story isn’t uncommon. Time and proper therapy may alleviate symptoms of the damage and help you recognize and deal with situations where you lose words. I understand your frustration, but running away is certainly not the answer.”
“I’m going home.”
“No you’re not,” the therapist said flatly. “You are a young man with his entire life ahead of him. You’ve been told the difficulties that lie ahead, as well as the potential dangers. And you’ve likely chosen to kill yourself.”
“Okay, well, I appreciate your honesty. But I could die here, just the same, right? There’s no guarantee I won’t stumble into a bathroom door and drop dead.”
The therapist sighed. “Again, with long-term physical therapy you will stumble less. You will run into fewer bathroom doors, or kitchen or bedroom doors.”
“Your recommendation that I accept a new life of being taught how not to stumble into doors is duly noted.”
“You pointed to a picture of an elephant when I asked you to show me the hamburger.”
“I was kidding.”
“If you were kidding, then that too is a manifestation of a serious psychological condition,” he’d said, once again sighing long and hard for effect. “Okay, I have other patients I am seriously neglecting.” He held out a long-fingered, delicate brown hand to Dante.
Dante took the hand. “I knew it was an elephant.”
And now, contrary to all recommendations, here he was in the Rarotonga International Airport.
A smiling woman in a flower-patterned dress, whose skin was as black as any he’d seen, ushered Dante through customs with a friendly wave. He walked straight through the building and back out into the humid air on the other side of the terminal, stopping to consider his next move. Still some four hundred miles from “home”—easily the toughest segment of the journey since it meant going across open ocean waters—Dante decided to join the nearest line of waiting people. Let fate move things along for a while, he thought, as he stood next to the twenty tourists and locals who were lined up in an orderly fashion at the roadside curb. The quiet collection of people moved as one, looking first right and then left, prompted by the distant approach of each noisy vehicle.
When the first bus pulled up, Dante noticed that the big marquee over the windshield simply read, “Clockwise.”
“Clockwise sounds good,” Dante whispered as he climbed the stairs, brimming backpacks slung over each shoulder. “Maybe we’ll stop for a nice elephant burger.”
With a hard jolt, the bus pulled away.
Chapter 24
Dante sat at one of three picnic tables under a corrugated plastic awning of a burger stand midway between the airport and Avarua, Cook Islands’ national capital. Trusting fate seemed to be working out so far. According to a local woman on the clockwise traveling bus, the capital would be the best place to hire a one-way boat ride to East Pukapuka. When he’d asked about the clockwise bus, she’d explained there was another bus somewhere out on the same highway, called the anti-clockwise bus. It made the same ninety kilometer loop around the island perimeter, traveling in the opposite direction.
Written across the four dollar, one-way ticket Dante held folded in his hand were the words, “Please smile.”
The driver announced
“breakfast time” and pulled the bus to a stop along the Ara Tapu, the unnamed main road circling the island. The milling travelers either waited in line for food or sat watching the light morning traffic zoom by. Noisy motor scooters and small cars raced along the paved Polynesian highway, chased by low clouds trapped by the hills and then pushed parallel to the coast.
“First time to Raro?” one of the passengers sitting across the picnic table from Dante asked.
“I think so.” Dante was starving but tired. His leg muscles were burning from all the standing around. The line to the burger window wasn’t moving, so he decided his stomach could wait. The unbearable humidity had plastered his polo shirt and khaki pants to his skin. From the center of the table, Dante snatched a few paper napkins being held down with a rock. As he swept the napkin across his forehead, fat drops of sweat caught in his eyelashes, stinging his eyes.
“Here for a holiday?” a woman asked. A small child wearing only a diaper—perhaps her granddaughter?—lay curled on her wide lap. She stroked the long black hair of the two-or-three-year-old who nuzzled into the blue checkerboard pattern of her dress.
“I’m passing through, heading back home.”
“Where’s home for you?”
“Do you know East Pukapuka?”
“You don’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen from East Pukapuka.” The woman raised her eyebrows. “Only brown people lived on East Pukapuka.”
“Lived?”
“Yes, the big wave.” The woman looked down and wrinkled her nose, lifting the diaper waistband to check for the source of the odor.
“What do you mean by big wave?”
“The big wave washed everything away.” The woman again stroked the child’s hair, having apparently found nothing in the diaper. “Everybody knows about the big wave. Lots of pictures in the newspapers, but maybe not back where you’re comin’ from, right?”
“No, wait, there was a tsunami?” Dante tried not to panic. He’d watched an hour-long show on channel sixty-three about the devastation of tsunamis. Entire cultures were wiped out, and once-bustling villages were left looking like trash dumps. “You’re certain it hit East Pukapuka?”
“Yes, of course I’m certain. Rescuers had nothing to do but bury the dead that were left. Fishing boat found one body way, way out at sea beyond the island, maybe forty kilometers. It was a terrible thing.” The woman shook her head. “It was a really big wave.”
“Everyone is dead? The entire village was killed?” Dante pictured the travel channel images of children’s faces, of the handsome men and women who populated his dreams. But now they were dead? Dante tried to recall the voice of the sobbing girl he’d heard as he’d climbed from the dark water on the leeward side of the island following each night’s swim. He knew she was lost and calling out a person’s name, but the name was nonsense, another piece of gibberish from his screwed up brain. The dream always ended before he had a chance to look for the girl and help her search.
“No worries, everybody’s okay,” the woman said, but her eyes were filled with tears. “They’ve all gone on to Happa Now. It’s okay to miss them, but the people are in a good, good place.”
“When did this happen?” Dante knew the woman meant the people had gone to some form of Heaven. His stomach had begun to churn at the smell of onions and frying meat. He wasn’t sure how to react, how news of this catastrophe should make him feel. It was as if a long lost twin had died in a car crash while coming to meet him for the first time. Dante watched the cars zip past, feeling guilty that the entire event was beginning to seem less horrible. After all, there were no other people on East Pukapuka he’d come to know; they were nothing but images from a collection of snapshots or exotic postcards. Complete strangers, except for the unseen child whose plaintive voice called out the name of a long-dead writer from thousands of miles away.
“It’s been maybe a couple weeks, now. You had people there? East Pukapuka was really your home?”
Dante struggled to answer the Raro woman, just as he had struggled to respond to his therapist. At the care center he’d been pressed again and again, until his brain physically hurt. To be absolutely certain something was true when faced with indisputable evidence it was not caused actual physical pain.
“Leave me alone,” had been the answer he had given his therapist when confronted with facts refuting what he knew to be true. But that surely wasn’t an acceptable answer for this woman holding a baby in her lap at a roadside food stand. Dante was forced to respond honestly by the innocence of the woman’s question and the fact that he’d come into her life by boarding her clockwise traveling bus. Dante decided to keep trusting in fate.
“I had an accident.” Dante looked directly into the woman’s brown eyes. “They told me I suffered a traumatic brain injury that put me into a long coma. Now I’m here, trying to get home to a place I’ve never been. I know it’s crazy.”
“I’m sorry for your injury.” The woman paused, stroking the baby’s hair. “But maybe it’s not crazier than a sea god who sends a wave to kill a hundred people.”
“My memory was erased. Everything was gone except for this path I kept following each evening, just before sunset. It led to the edge of the water. I’d swim far out, until I could barely see the tree tops.”
“This path was on East Pukapuka?” the woman asked in a hushed voice, turning the baby over in her lap to rub small circles on its naked back.
“Yes, my home.”
“The people are all gone from the island,” she said in a gentle voice. “They moved on, far away to Happa Now. No comin’ back.”
“I’d hear a little girl’s voice when I climbed back out of the water. She was crying and calling out for someone, trying to find her family, I suppose.”
“So you dreamed a girl survived the big wave?”
“My therapist insisted it was a dream.” Dante paused, watching the traffic. “But I know it couldn’t have been a dream. I felt the coral scrape my knees when I swam across the reef, and the texture of the thick mat of seaweed I had to push out of my way closer to the shore. It all happened, night after night. I tasted the salt water, felt the broken shells on my palms. The little girl’s voice …”
“She was calling out somebody’s name?” The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What name did she call?”
Dante hesitated, embarrassed by how nonsensical this memory was, how his mind mocked him, turning language and chunks of words into gibberish. The name he’d clearly heard, night after night, had to be a mistake, a misfiring of his wounded, jumbled brain function. What he heard were the cries of a brokenhearted little girl on a South Pacific island, the sole survivor of a disastrous tsunami. Dante knew she had suffered the loss of her entire family, her home, and was now crying out for a famous English biologist—dead for more than a century and featured regularly on cable channel science and travel shows.
“She was sobbing,” Dante finally said, once again feeling like the dimwitted fool unable to convey a simple request for a salt shaker, “and she was crying out for Charles Darwin.”
The woman’s eyes widened as she scooped the sleeping child up in her arms and hugged her tightly. “Charles Darwin was a very, very nice lady. She was my cousin on your island.”
Chapter 25
In his dream Captain Dobby took a swig and sang an old pirate song about rum, his legs twitching and jigging to the tune. His dream-knees were like new—didn’t make popping and crackling noises, never threatened to give out. His actual bottle of rum lay empty on the tugboat’s pilot house floor. Propelled by the undulating sea, it turned slow revolutions on its side, as if ghosts were playing spin the bottle.
Dobby lay slumped across a salvaged wicker loveseat that left the skin of his half-naked body dented and creased—a sight that always scared the hell out of him upon first waking. For the love of Christ, what miserable disease this time?
In his dream Dobby stood on the bridge of a luxury yacht breathing in a spicy fragrance. The glorio
us and familiar scent flicked on the switch to his salivary glands. Spittle meandered between gray chest hairs, finally pooling in his belly button, which was already half full with filthy lint.
Dobby’s drool was produced by the heavy herbal smell of Chinese turtle soup. How long had it been since his last taste? Back before he’d left Pitcairn three months ago, give or take an alcohol-clouded week. It had been at the tavern with the oily skinned brown girls who offered dollar lap-dances to the same bar stool regulars. The ones with wives who would strangle them bare-handed if they were ever caught straddled by one of these bimbos. Polynesia was a man’s world, but a place where the quiet wrath of a woman should never be underestimated. There were sharp knives absolutely everywhere.
Dobby had sat on a tall stool of the Little Bible Beer and Grub, a favorite haunt for locals around Adamstown. It was an easy hike from the shack he kept on a rocky bluff, which offered a wide view of the yam plantations. The drunken stumble home was fraught with danger, however; one bad step meant a sixty-foot plunge into a jagged lava rock patch.
At the rickety wood table Dobby hunched over the steaming bowl of turtle soup, spoon to his nose, eyes watching the chunky bimbos making their lazy rounds. The spices cleared the crusted sea salt from his sinuses, overran the musky taste of locally brewed beer, and took him back through the years to when his mother stood over the huge simmering pot every Thanksgiving. As usual, his dream wandered through time, took him to a place where he was maybe eight years old and the smell of turtle soup evoked love and fear.
In Texas his mother had served snapping turtle instead of turkey on important holidays. Normally dinnertime was peaceful; it would take a few hours for enough Old Grandad bourbon to combine with the beer and turn his father all black and ornery. Dobby knew this was the reason his mother stretched out the meals as long as she could. She brought out each course real slow, fussing over his father. It was her way of buying time before the hitting started. His father was probably even in on her game, but he sure seemed to relish being treated like the king of his own single wide. He was Texas royalty, lording over the end of the table, a stained napkin jammed into his shirt collar.