Nine Island

by Jane Alison

  But it’s still not time. I know it’s not time. It can’t be, because he purrs.

  Flooding everywhere! Not just the men’s spa and those lines of apartments and that watering woman upstairs, but the sky, the ground: so much traffic between sky and earth and sea down here. Lightning, fireworks, waterspouts, jets. It rains every day at four o’clock. If you’re sitting on the balcony you can watch the rain come—it can be a pleasure watching the rain come, just sitting still and letting the world go. To the west, over the causeway and beyond the bay, where sandbars emerge at low tide and motorboats scallop the water, above all that, the sky is slowly overtaken by scuds of deep soft gray. First those thick gray banks roll over the horizon, then they draw so near they dissolve into skeins of water that hide the city bit by bit, a moving dissolution. You can watch the street-shine creep this way, slowly blurring buildings and parks, a zone of shine moving down Dade, over the bridge, and down the causeway, and exactly then you smell rain on hot pavement. As soon as you do there’s a hitch in the air and you’d better run inside fast because all at once spray is whipping your windows and you can’t even see Costa Brava. The rain slashes at a slant, streaming across the glass. Inside I sit and hold Buster, watching rain river down the windows, the hurricane doors rattling in their tracks.

  • • •

  Well, it is the season, said N.

  I’d run into her and P waiting in the garage, all of us having hoped to escape, to go out for a walk after one long downpour looked about done, but no, another explosion. Water spewed up from the garage’s drain holes, spewed up hip-high and thunderous. Outside, through the garage grate, water gushed from manholes and storm drains along the pink sidewalks, foaming, frothing, rivering over the curbs.

  Hurricane season, I mean, said N, and when she did I could see the radar line clocking, searching for the telltale eye.

  P gripped the garage’s grate and half-hung, gazing out at the pour. The whole city will be underwater in thirty years, he said. Or sooner! To say nothing of this derelict place. He lifted his hands from the grate and laughed.

  Funny man, that P: a glaze of jolliness bright over despair in his eyes.

  Suddenly the roaring slackened, then stopped, and through the grate came blaze and steam. On the sidewalk lay bright pools of sky.

  Thank god, said N. Let’s go.

  She pushed the button, the grate rose, and she and P passed into sunlight. But I waited and looked up at the giant belly of the pool, hanging down in the dimness, surrounded by cars.

  Now that it was quiet, could hear a steady patter of dripping water. Water rich with chemicals and time slid down the pool’s stalactites, making dark glinting puddles on the garage floor. And the belly of the pool itself: its rough concrete hide was like an ancient cave. You could almost see upon it the painted antelopes and aurochs, the dead man lying on his back, and beside him, the bird and the spear.

  I TOLD MY mother that I knew being alone was not a real way to live. Like everyone, though, a liar. Doch, doch. It’s the realest way. If you tend to a blind cat and stranded duck, and fragments of men drop into your in-box, and you talk now and then to a skeletal lady and wobbling old mother, and text occasionally with people your age, and focus on bringing a dead poet to life, surely that’s enough.

  Snow White had seven dwarfs, after all.

  Must have added up to something.

  I mean it. If a person drives herself around and has her own place and can fix most things or find and pay someone who can if she can’t and is able to dig up inner resources to sustain herself even in bone-dry moments, absolutely baked and bone-dry moments, and if she has long since decided that for fuck’s sake it’s all right to drink alone—I mean, come on, there’s no one to drink with—and if she’s also decided that self-pleasuring is more than fine, it’s healthsome, especially if accompanied by fantasies drawn from excursions into the world: that’s fine.

  I tried this out on N today and got her slow sad smile.

  It’s good for a person to have another person, she said. It’s good to have a mate.

  LINO WAS IN the elevator this evening when I was going out for my Venetian walk, wearing the usual FitFlops and the same shorts I wear every day and have probably worn for three decades. Lino looked me up and down. Beside him stood a brontosaurus in white sneakers, white shorts, white T-shirt, blue belt, with thick, brass-bright arms and legs.

  You a personal trainer, too? said Lino.

  Me? No. Just a civilian resident.

  Lino peered at me from under his hat, this one white straw with a pink band. Okay, I might have seen you here before, he said. Maybe. He hooked a thumb at the man beside him. This is my personal trainer, he said. Say hello to the lady.

  The trainer grinned a gold-toothed grin and said something that sounded like Chiello.

  (Russian? Bodyguard? Hit man? They actually exist and will come to old Love Boats? A guy to bust in and flood apartments and spas?)

  You’re helping Lino get fit? I asked.

  Ha! said Lino as the doors slid open. He’ll do more than that!

  Oh?

  The bodyguard smiled at his sneakers.

  ANOTHER ETIOLOGY. Aristophanes’ spheres in Plato’s story (the spheres everyone seems to be writing about these days, even though I have loved them privately for decades and even wrote them into my marriage so-called vows): Aristophanes’ spheres, the happy monsters that were each made of two people, man-woman or man-man or woman-woman, rolling around with four legs and four arms and two heads and hearts each, private parts squashed together. The only way to be whole was to be two. But these compounds were too strong, and a lightning bolt split them apart. Now they, we, spend our lives looking for our lost other halves.

  No.

  No other halves.

  This is what I thought as I swam fierce laps, gasped at the lip of the pool, my legs swaying away each time I entered Fran’s gyre, the unstoppable gyre of the senior club I am joining, and stared up at twenty-four stories of balconies, cloaked in the Love Boat’s long shadow that each day leaves a little bit sooner.

  Come closer, closer.

  As Sir Gold once whispered to me.

  WAS WALKING toward the drawbridge along the green verge when a Jet Skier skimmed extremely loud and close, so close he almost ground into the rocks and I could see the sleekness of his skin. He was in black, his Jet Ski was black, and I stopped and looked at his forearms, his strong hands on the horns of his machine.

  Then I just stepped gracefully off the bridge and skimmed down, down, slipped behind him, my legs clasping his wet legs, my breasts pressing his taurine back.

  Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go to the sea!

  Standing up there with bony elbows on the dirty concrete, old feet in cracking FitFlops, as below me he whipped and spun in the water and froth, delighting like a dolphin.

  Out of the blue I thought: Look at me!

  Now!

  He rode on. He drew a huge spraying circle in the green, looped into another circle, digging, churning, cutting deep, dredging and ripping, spraying water and fuel-stink and engine screech, bucking and plowing, all horsepower, manpower.

  Something cold stirred within me. I thought: Harm should come to you.

  Then forgot about him and walked on past the duck, first island, second, past the old pear-shaped man who goes around with a bag to feed the cats, the old man I am becoming, past the crazy boy who swoops on his banana bike, although he’s way too big and fat for it; he always shouts Hello, I always shout Hello back; past the HAREM-car house, smoking inside with sinister sex, could see it in the fogged glass. Then, walking back, there was the sunset, splendid as always, and a person gets tired of appreciating the damned sunset, having to keep stopping and turning to look at it more, with tourists on the Duck Tour–mobile taking sunset selfies.

  Enough with the sunset.

  Like everyone, a liar. I do appreciate it! Beauty like that—makes you helpless. M
akes me walk home stupidly backward, filling eyes with color.

  At the Love Boat, walked as usual past the Dumpsters and through the gate over the soft grass by the mahogany tree. Skidded off FitFlops and lingered on the tender silky blades, then walked along the dock, peering into the water because, you know, that’s living the life.

  From the dock, something ahead of me suddenly slid into the bay. Not the first time this had happened: I once startled an iguana sunning on the dock and it slithered fast and plopped in; by the time I reached the spot, it had become a fish. There this thing was now, in the water plugging along with a beak and clawed wings batting. I crouched, crawled sideways as it platypussed along. Feathers? Fur? Webbed feet?

  Meanwhile became faintly aware of a sound—the kind you hear without properly hearing, whatever the phrase for such ephemeral sensory experience is. Maybe boys shouting on Monument Island, maybe someone singing on a boat, nothing you’d lift your head for.

  So didn’t. Kept peering into the water trying to decipher the bird, lizard, or fish.

  But then the noise began to lift from the air, to clarify itself in my ear. It was a voice. A man’s voice. A man’s voice shouting Help.

  Stood and scanned the bay, darkening, the sun nearly sunk.

  Tiny and distant: Help!

  In the bay’s swift middle river, a coconut rolled. Far away by the verge, a Jet Ski bucked alone.

  But no voice would rise from my throat.

  Stone, a tree. Could not speak or move.

  But as I stood frozen, from above:

  Hold on! I’ve called! They’re coming!

  I finally jerked to life, ran down the dock, spiraled up to the pool, through the jungle and the glass doors, into the mezzanine, down the hall to Virgil, who was already running with his walkie-talkie.

  I followed him back out, and we watched from the dock as a police boat whizzed under the drawbridge, then slowed, circled, and stilled, and a small man was pulled from the bay.

  Lucky guy, said Virgil. Lucky somebody saw.

  Rose to my twenty-first floor, not catching own guilty eye in the mirror. Then opened my door to see just the end of it: Buster spinning, nails scraping crazily at the floor, as if being lanced by lightning. Liquid flew from him—he’d flown right out of his diaper—his wild paws slid and he skidded and slipped, but clambered up because he had to keep spinning.

  There’s nothing you can do. Just wait until it’s over, steer him gently from corners and table legs that could hurt.

  Spinning, the sound of his panting, the clicking of nails on the cork.

  Oh, baby cat.

  Finally the lightning was spent and he collapsed, puddled black on the floor. I lifted him and held him close and warm in a towel, his little head slumped on my arm.

  They don’t know where they are after a seizure, the vet says. Even if they’re not blind and deaf, too. Important to hold him awhile.

  Sat on the sofa and stroked the wet fur between his long ears, down his knobby back, in his little underarms until he slept. Then put fresh tissue in his box and laid him gently down.

  My mother’s voice on the phone was soft.

  Don’t you think, darling, she said, don’t you think all of this might be telling you something? Maybe—something might need to change.

  WELL, IT WAS a long time, in Germany. You can’t help but start to feel it: hundred percent an alien. Ten years there, five years staring out the greasy train window at dawn on my way to the Frauenklinik. Then the greasy train window home again hours later, the greasy window of the tram, and back to our bare apartment sixty-six concrete steps in the sky. Then the wall of windows looking out at the gray, when I’d come in with a fresh bag of vials and needles, to start a new month of trying.

  Calendars kept count. First the calendar with a polar bear, lorikeet, pink-bottomed monkey; then the calendar with a ghost gum, baobab, poinciana; then the one with types of rock. I like metamorphic rock most, but you’d probably figure that.

  Dry German sun came in the window, on days when there was sun. Otherwise lead air, lead sky, wet weighty cloud. Same ads each season at the tram stops, year after year for ten years, same glares from old men, old women, cigarette smoke in the sooty air, broken bottles, puddles of piss and beer and rain.

  Schöne Schlitz, a drunk once said, pointing between my legs. My husband didn’t notice, maybe dreaming something else, but anyway, did nothing.

  Schöne Schlitz, sure, I thought. Schlitz good for nothing.

  In the summer, wisteria grew inconceivably huge from a small pot on the ground out front. It rose lush and weighty all the way to our floor and hung so thick across the wall of glass that it made our place a terrarium, green light. I’d hang little mesh bags of suet and seed in the leaves, bags I bought at Schlecker. Hung four across the wide glass, and sometimes two or even three little bandit birds would peck at a time, as I sat at the white table inside and watched. A pair nested in the leaves each year, those little bandit birds. Two eggs, sometimes three. Watched until they cracked and opened, noisy skinny chicks, and flew.

  Buster watched the birds, also. Year after year.

  And watched me, too, ears alert when I’d sit on the bed again, crying.

  Down on the street, seen through a hole I’d cut in the leaves, my husband would sit at the tram stop. Sit on the dirty bench with his satchel, holding his face in his hands.

  Maybe tomorrow, maybe someday, as the song says.

  Finally, when there was just nothing left, I split up our things and flew over the ocean. Stayed a time with my mother.

  Then, the hopeful tour of old boyfriends. Lurch, Mick, the Devil.

  Then that month with Sir Gold.

  And then, now.

  IN THE SKY this evening, as the sun set, as colors arced from shale far at sea, up to deep blue, then falling through sheer blue to pure glow to lime, coral, and rose, there was suddenly a radiance high in the clouds to the north: light struck clouds far higher than sunlit clouds can ever be. I leaned out on the balcony, looking. The glow intensified, became a small bright sun that rose and rose, trailing a thin darkness beneath it. In the park below, a man pointed up for his little girl to look, and both tilted back their heads. A boy on a scooter stopped, too, leaned on one leg to watch. And at Costa Brava, one of the runners stopped running and pressed against the chill glass to see: the shuttle’s final launch.

  We all watched as that small sun rose and then split in two, and half fell away, and the single flame rose and rose until it was gone in space.

  AT LEAST I CAN still try to save the damned duck. It is so hot, nearly August, blistering scorching shattering hot, and from ten until six she huddles in the sea grape waiting for water, for the day to die. I see her there at midday when I can’t stand being inside anymore and can’t stand transmuting and looking for messages, so go outside in the flaming heat under my hot pink umbrella.

  The duck is thinner; she trembles.

  Enough. Today I am going out with the net. If she’s weak and addled I’m more likely to catch her. I am determined to catch her. Will hydrate, put on the big visor, gather Grape-Nuts, water, and net, and head out to capture this duck.

  —four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve—

  NO DUCK. THREE cars slowed down to watch me try. She waddled toward me as usual, thinking I bore only Grape-Nuts and water, then spotted the net and fluttered hysterically around, hopped down the rocks, sailed into the bay.

  I stood roasting with my net. A car pulled over, hand out the window taking a photo. Outside the bridge house the bridge lady watched.

  Am done. No more trying to save the duck. Just bring her food and water and let her live her stranded life.

  When I got back to the Love Boat, two police cars idled out front. I went around to the trash containers to ask Tina what was happening.

  She looked up from writing down the numbers of packages with her pungent black marker and said, Blood. On the w
all.

  Really!

  She nodded, eyes stern. Things are getting ugly. I’ve been here twenty-five years and thought this building was as crazy as it could get, and now this.

  But where?

  The steam room.

  Whose?

  The men’s.

  No, whose blood?

  She opened her eyes wide. No one’s saying.

  After stowing net in Mini, went dazzled out to the dock, picturing two eighty-year-old men slamming each other into the tiles, one breaking a fragile beaked nose. Or one of those stealthy playboys pummeling another one’s head in rage, or someone else pummeling the playboy? But no, surely then there’d be an ambulance, too. Blood extracted some other way and smeared on the wall? The mirror? Inside the steam room, or the sauna? Was the men’s spa just like the women’s?

  I hurried along the dock, up the spiral staircase, past the diving girl-tree, over the cracked concrete path, through mahoganies, bottle brush, slim Manila palms, past the pool to the spa rooms.

  Virgil was standing at the door with his arms crossed and shook his head when I asked.

  Bad things happening in there these days, he said.

  Actually dangerous?

  He looked down at me gravely and said, Yes.

  All because of the pool?

  A lot of money involved, he said. And you know people are wicked about money.

  But, he said after a moment, rubbing his neck and squinting, it’ll all be over soon.

  HAVE WALKED OVER to the Beach, but this time went south. Past Flamingo Park, black-and-white balls being kicked on the grass beneath she-oaks, past neon balls being hit in clay that’s often an inch of red liquid. Past the old buildings that old Fran helped save, the salmon or lemon Deco buildings now a-throb with the young in one another’s arms. Over the sinuous pink sidewalk to the low dunes, the beach, the lines of lounge chairs that once were not there, and the plastic bottles left in the sand, waiting to join their friends at sea, pioneering a brave new island.