Jess imagined all the sailors coming home, young boys who had joked around while standing ankle-deep in radioactive dust. Sailors entering civilian life, internal organs glowing, something lurid in the bone. Somewhere old Naval ships in watery graves like poisoned, irradiated whales.
. . . What do I tell our child? Her father is irradiated. Maybe it is in her genes. All I can do is send her away. Back, and back to Kona. When he dies, where will I belong?...
When Jess’s father finally died, her mother cut herself adrift, moving through the Mediterranean—Malta, Cyprus, Crete. Islands, always islands, trying to re-create her childhood in the Pacific. Eventually, she grew weary, finding a certain peace in an oasis floating in the oceans of the Sahara. In the end, that metaphor sufficed.
Jess had lain all night in that hotel in Algiers, reading her mother’s journals, weeping until she felt bled out. It was dawn when she rose from a bed reliefed in used tissues, a colony of small, damp mummies. She leaned against the window, smelling creosote and bait from the docks, hearing cocks crow from the roofs of the Casbah, watching a street merchant whose cart had tipped chase oranges down a cobbled street toward the leaping light of the sea.
Morning had burst upon her senses, and Jess thought of her mother as a child, skin embossed with mist of rain forests dense with mynah and wild boar. Then she saw her mother older, tea-colored and beautiful—broad cheeks, full lips, hair dark, electric—riding bareback on a beach of coral fragments that, washed by waves, made a barking sound like dogs. And in the background, Pono stately, aloof, beckoning to her. Then her mother banished from the world of her origins, and how, with desperate bursts of color on canvas, she spent her life re-creating that world. She thought how her mother’s life had been set on a course many years ago, a course neither time, nor place, nor age could change. Maybe her death was more than accident, or intention. Maybe it was, in a final sense, a pledge of accountability.
Cocks crowed again, a cruise ship in the harbor gave a Wagnerian blast, and Jess knew it was time to go. Watching the merchant chase oranges into the sea, diminishing like a figure swimming into the dunes, she had hugged the box with her mother’s ashes. She would take her home to her ocean origins, back to her beach of barking sands. Her mother would roam coral canyons with ’aumākua, “talk story” with the ghosts of her blood.
That summer, Pono turned away when Jess arrived with her mother’s remains. But Jess saw her mourning at night in the ocean, diving under and under, drinking her daughter’s ashes. Her mother had always said the sea was the Hawaiian’s nourishment and escape. For Jess it became like an amniotic fluid that kept her alive in the months of grief that followed. I didn’t want to remember, wanted only to swim. She found peace in the drug-like stroking day after day, night after night along the Pacific shores, swimming with the intensity of a starving woman wallowing in food. Feeling nothing but the suck and pull of the tide, she swam for miles with the agility and speed of a racer, day after day, week after week.
Sometimes, feeling the grind of aching muscles, she rolled over on her back, paralleling sharks dreaming off in the distance. Sometimes she was shocked to see stars and a partial moon. The day had passed and Jess had consumed nothing but air. Sometimes at night the canoe, Vanya and Rachel coming after me. She lost flesh and looked starved, her tongue and lips cracked. For weeks, Pono kept her from the sea. But when her mouth healed she plunged in again, deep down into boulevards of perpetual forgetting, streets she could navigate blind.
One day, feeling her arms spin in their sockets, pulling the ocean behind her, Jess looked down at the ocean floor, seeing forests of staghorn coral like ivory branches glowing through the blue. Her mother had described this coral, the feeling of flying over preserves of running reindeer. And in that moment, Jess felt airborne, beneath her herds of pounding hooves. She began to feel her mother inhabited her, that she was seeing the world with two pairs of eyes. She was living for two.
Swimming became so much a part of her body, her interior, Jess began to swim without the ocean. She swam in her dreams, and the dreams became constant. Sometimes she woke with stiff arms, exhausted. Returning to Manhattan, she swam through her days while bent over broken animals, swam through the city, stroking through crowds, the ocean so indelibly imprinted on her, she carried it within her, giving her movements a certain grace. Perhaps this unreal quality, this fluid transluence, was what drew the man named Mars.
That year Jess had begun wearing what she thought of as urban guerilla clothes. At a certain age, living alone in Manhattan, women tended to tighten up. You moved at top speed, hands on your holster, so to speak. You slept with your eyes open. It was a city of quick swerves, where the race was to avoid waking up in your own blood. A city where laconic rich of marmoreal pallor peeked out from French windows on the park. And in the park, tribal sounds, drums, rituals, now and then a clutch of fur, a dog’s head. Even a human sacrifice.
After fifteen years in the city, Jess had begun to draw in, her world circumscribed by five or six blocks. Or, maybe, she thought, the city was shrinking. Her house and clinic were on a quiet street in Greenwich Village, not far from where there had once been beautiful young men cruising in bars where they danced, fought, made love in back rooms. Now the streets were quiet, the young men gone, or going, rampantly, and in degrees. They limped down the streets together, weak, and wary, and proud, and dying.
She wanted to say to them, “We are completely in your power.” Because youth and beauty and valor suddenly erased leave a place impoverished.
And in some warped corner of her head, Jess envied them, these young men, nursing each other, mourning each other, some even dying in twos. Who would nurse her in this town? Who would mourn her? Since her divorce she had had random lovers, affairs that sieved from lack of trying. Friends left the city in droves, exhausted by death, decay and violence. Now no one claimed her time. She was of interest to no one except, maybe, her daughter, Anna, in college down south near her father.
Then one day two years earlier, Jess had stood watching thousands of marathon runners locomote across bridges, through city streets, like herds of wildlife on the Serengeti. She watched for hours, thinking how after ten miles the body starts feeding on itself, and after twenty, it starts eating the muscles and heart. Running seemed something else in this city, not a sport, but a form of panic. Later, strolling downtown to the Village, Jess had stood before the Flatiron Building in coming dusk, its great angled structure lit up like the prow of an ocean liner sailing into port. It seemed to be bearing down on her like ships they had watched as girls in Honolulu swaying in to Aloha Tower from Hong Kong and Singapore. She stood there, feeling little paw-strokes of homesickness, knowing night would bring the full assault. Then she crossed the street, heedless to the swerving ambulance.
The driver saw a boy-haired woman with a dreamy gait, gliding against the light. In the stretcher behind him, a homeless man was bleeding to death, a technician yelling, “... this dude’s going, BP’s dropping ninety over sixty-eight . . . we’re losing him ...”
Radio crackling, oxygen cylinders wildly rocking, the driver hit the brakes, throwing the technician to his knees. He thought he hit the brakes, the ambulance kept moving. Jess turned, something bearing down on her. She woke with rain pattering her cheeks.
“Miss, can you hear me? Jesus, can you hear me?” His voice was deep, angry, eyes floaty behind thick glasses. His sweat poured down on her. “Blink your eyes. Miss, can you blink your eyes?”
She blinked slowly. “It’s all right. I’m a physician.”
“I don’t give a damn what you are. You walked against the light.”
Someone probed her arms and legs. She flexed her fingers. “Really, I think I’m okay.”
He leaned close, gently lifted one of her lids, peered at her with a light. Unaccountably, Jess reached up and touched his face. A crowd gathered like a small herd at feeding time. The technician pushed them back as Jess stood, shaky but alert. She couldn’t see
m to let go of the stranger’s arm.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get you to Saint Vincent’s, get some X rays.”
The dead man was covered with a sheet, the technician beside him on the radio. The driver was tall, Afro-American, all elbows and wrists, his bones so close to the surface he looked slightly undernourished. But there was a tenseness of muscles in his face, a resoluteness that spoke of someone sustained by nerves. He waited with her for the lab reports, and when she said she was a a veterinarian, he laughed.
“Animals? Jesus, whole neighborhoods dying of hunger, you’re playing around with people’s pets.”
Mars Scoville, who had hoped to become an orthopedic surgeon. Someone had sponsored him, someone had died, his scholarship fell through. With his mother ill, his younger brothers hungry, he had dropped out of college, taking jobs that went nowhere. For the last ten years he had driven an ambulance for Emergency Medical Services in the city.
“But I’m still a contender, I’ve still got dreams.”
Now he was trying to fund a Volunteer Ambulance Corps in Harlem, his off-hours filled with walking his neighborhood drumming up cash donations. He had outfitted an old van as a makeshift ambulance, and on weekends he and several medical technicians listened in on police and EMS radio scanners, responding to calls in Harlem on their own, sometimes arriving ten or twenty minutes before the regular ambulance, and often saving lives.
He asked Jess a hundred questions about medical procedures, the difference between human blood counts and animals, differences in blood pressure, body temperatures, the quickest way to cauterize a wound, sterilize a puncture. The quickest emetics for food poisoning. He stood silent as she showed him through her clinic on the first floor of her small townhouse. Carpeted foyer, expensively furnished waiting room, receptionist, assistants in white coats. Examining room, surgery room, a room full of pampered animals in roomy cages.
Mars shook his head, laughing. “We got families uptown so hungry .. . you know what they’d call these silly, little pets? Meat. They’d call them meat.”
She offered him a drink, and spent the next few hours trying to justify her practice, her income, the nights she volunteered, tending the poor and homeless, nights she put in at an AIDS hospice. She talked about the psychology of medicine and compassion, healing and charity. While she chattered on nervously, he stared at her, his gaze on her face like the cold, flat side of a knife.
“You’re what we call a twenty-minute do-gooder,” he said. “You people . . . when you’re finished with your so-many-hours-a-week volunteer work, you wash your hands, comb your hair, and go to cocktails in your townhouses, your designer penthouses. I hate that kinda’ shit. It means the poor and the homeless and the dying are only visible at your convenience. The rest of your life we just seem to . . . Golly!. .. disappear.”
Jess had studied him intently. “I volunteer every single night and every weekend. I don’t deserve your disdain.”
He answered quietly and thoughtfully. “Guess what I’m saying is you got to live it, to understand it. Be poor, to know poor. Sounds like your life has been kinda’ soft, Jess. You tell me your people in Hawai‘i are dying out, they’re being wiped out. Why not go home and fight for them? Your history is taking place without you.”
He found he had to control his anger when talking to her as a white. Yet he was drawn to her native side, her longing for family, her confusion about her skin. In turn, she sometimes found Mars childlike, the way those driven with a purity of purpose—who plunge straight on, looking neither left or right—seem vulnerable and childlike. Other times Jess felt if she touched him, she ran the risk of being burned. He was angry, the angriest man she’d ever known, and that rage shone out of him with a strange and terrifying beauty.
The first time they made love, he took her ruthlessly and quickly, thinking that was what she wanted. In time, he slowed, made love to her tenderly, patiently, with regard for her pleasure, sweat turning his dark shoulders to epaulets of light, their bodies thrumming and matched in a wordless Morse of understanding. Still, he was resentful, hating her privilege, her lack of struggle, her seeming complacency about the injustices, the indecencies of life. He pulled away from her, then, missing her, came back, so that she was never sure of him, of his feelings.
Yet, for two years Mars performed a kind of exorcism over her loneliness, the pain of her self-exile from the islands. When Jess looked back, that time with him would be a time when the city became more threatening, more intelligible and real, than it had ever been for her. She saw the horror of real poverty, children stunted by starvation, teenagers strung out on needles. It would be a remembrance of weekends spent answering emergency calls in Harlem, of sleeping in shifts in the van, eating meals from paper plates while IV bottles clanged against her head. The smell of deep-fried food and blood. Weekends without bathing, living like guerillas speeding through war zones.
When the van finally broke down, Jess donated funds for a real ambulance, and seeing his dream coming to fruition, Mars now envisioned half a dozen Volunteer Ambulances in Harlem, even a headquarters office. Jess’s presence, her pale skin, caused tension, but her medical background was invaluable.
“We can learn from her,” Mars told his crews. “Shortcuts, save more lives.”
She helped teach new volunteers “triage,” a series of vital-signs checks in the ambulance which saved time when they got to the hospital. She helped train Harlem youngsters as a youth corps whose members attended first-aid classes. Some kids were excited by the training, talked about becoming medics, heart surgeons.
“Maybe one of them will make it,” Mars said. “And, definitely, my boy.”
His son lived with his ex-wife in Philadelphia, an athlete and top student who wanted to be a pediatrician. “He walks the line. I told him he ever slipped up, I’d kill him myself, before the drugs did.” He softened when he talked about his son, so Jess forgot about his anger, the rage that seemed to propel him, hold him to his vision.
One night in Harlem, a sixteen-year-old boy was jumped by a gang, shot through the ear, beaten with lead pipes. Blood poured so copiously from his head and chest, he seemed to be floating in a pool. Jess applied a neck brace, helped lift him onto the backboard, then the stretcher, holding the oxygen mask to his face.
“Breathe in deeply, son! Breathe in . . .”
His pulse was gone before they reached the hospital. Afterwards, sitting in the parking lot, she dropped her face and sobbed. “Why? How can they do this to each other?”
“How?” Mars looked at her, disgusted. “You know what it’s like to be born into a system that says you’re shit, that wears you down year after year till you’ve got no self-esteem? You despise yourself, can’t wait to mortify your own flesh, wipe out your race.” He shook his head. “Naw, you’ll never understand. Half of you is white, the other half is running scared.” He pushed open the ambulance door and walked away.
Jess sat there shaking, trying to understand.
After a while the black technician spoke up gently from the rear.
“Listen to me, Jess. I know your intentions are good. But man, it’s like .. . we’re those broken cats and dogs in your clinic. You want to set our bones, stitch our wounds, make us better. You can’t do that unless you know what makes us tick. You got to have blood knowledge, our history, our gospel. You got to know where it hurts.”
“I love Mars.”
He moved up close, so his face was just behind her head.
“No, baby. You don’t even know him. You’re looking for something you think Mars can give you, a ... a key, a solution.” He drove her home and reached across, opening her door. “I’m sorry, Jess. But like I said, you ain’t us. Whoever your people are, we ain’t them.”
Now, riding in from Kennedy Airport, all she could think of was Mars, what she had to tell him, her decisions, her moves. Then she remembered he wouldn’t be there anymore, and life outside the taxi turned one-dimensional, instantly flat. In her house
, she ignored the reception room and clinic, went straight upstairs, flicked on a tape Mars had left behind, John Coltrane’s Ascension.
She buried her face in Mars’s shirt, his smell like the music—wild, tart, ironic—a beautiful smell of church socials and outings, of gospel-rock and liquor and laughter, and slave ships and lynchings and killings, and runnings, and grief and poetry and jazz. The smell of someone ahead of her in vision, in rage, in demanding and rejoicing in the force of life, of life itself. The smell of a man whose stride she couldn’t match.
The days, mechanical days. Consultations with attorneys, associates buying out her practice. Meetings with real estate agents, clients, her staff.
“The house sale will take months, I know,” she told her attorney. “But I want the papers for the business transferral drawn up as fast as possible. I want to be home next month for the start of coffee harvesting.”
They were sitting in her office at the clinic, Jess toying with a pair of scissors. The man was a native New Yorker, a shrewd and costly lawyer.
“This move is insane,” he said. “I totally advise against it. You’re giving up a thriving practice, a six-figure income, to move to a place where plumbers go on honeymoons. Jess, what will you do with your brain?”
With not much thought she reached across and cut his tie in half.
And then, a flight to Durham, North Carolina, sitting with her daughter in a restaurant near Duke University. The girl was lovely, green eyes, palomino hair, skin of an almost milky transparency. Jess watched a blue vein pulsing in her neck. This is what I have accomplished. Though she’s no longer mine.
She saw her daughter seldom enough to see her with a perspective which was not totally distorted by sorrow or regret. So, as the years passed, she saw her each time in the light of an accelerated personal conflagration. That pleased Jess, she felt her daughter needed a little grief, a little humility. And yet... seeing hints of her mother’s features in the girl’s, her breathing changed, something hurt, like breathing through the wounded lungs of a bird. Sometimes Jess was guilty of the faint and singular hope that she would find her daughter ugly, abandoned, waiting for Jess to come and save her.
Shark Dialogues Page 37