A woman comes up behind me. Can I help you, Clare?
Me? I say. I can’t get used to my own name, the one everyone here knows for no reason and can say. Who are you?
Someone with you on my list. She points to a clipboard filled with names.
I see. She has a Dr. in front of her name on her tag, that entitles her to my name, the way she checks my tag.
Where am I? I ask.
The answer she gives inspires hope, to go with the insignia of snake and staff. We’re a large health organization, she says.
With the UN?
Wouldn’t that be nice. No, not us. I see from your records that you spent a little time on this island. What brought you here?
Nobody was going there.
She could say with a professional smile, How adventurous. Instead she says, Nobody is supposed to go there.
I guess not, I say. Why did they let me?
Some mix-up, somebody’s second cousin was asleep, no doubt.
Why don’t they evacuate the island?
It’s not that bad, she says.
Oh, really? I smile, like her. What happened to the boat that was supposed to take me back?
Boats are always late or just a myth around here. You must be glad to see this one. The doctor moves her pens on her pen guard. Over six weeks there, wasn’t it?
The boat rocks under my feet, a slight left, a slight right, and I’m uneasy to match. Over this woman’s shoulder is the island, locked in incomplete reproduction. Can I make a call? I ask.
Sure. But why not get these out of the way? She turns her clipboard full of paper around. Just a couple more releases. Sign here, here, and here. She presents her pen.
I see, I say. I stare at the small print. Ngarima’s wailing increases from somewhere below. I slide my foot in and out of my slipper. Do you have children? I ask her.
Not yet, she says. We’re hoping. She smiles the way they do, the ones who hope.
Have you ever seen any of their babies?
She waggles the clipboard. This is my first trip out. But I’ve seen pictures, of course.
I nod. With her of course, we’re in this together. Well, I say, I guess you have to have one to really appreciate those pictures.
She flattens the paper with her finger where I’m supposed to sign. You’ve had a very slight exposure, ma’am, she says. You should be on your way within a day or two of reaching port.
When is that?
Given the weather, it should be in three days.
I see. Three days, that’s great. Where can I make my phone call?
Over there, in the poop deck.
I sign.
~ ~ ~
Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? I start away from the cool plastic at my ear. Echo is a girl in a nymph costume, a shreddable tissue of green, who leans forward on a rock with her hands cupped to her lips, and another girl on another rock — a veritable Pacific of rocks, rocks that run right up to my ex’s own cool-plastic-touched ear — leans forward with her hands cupped, and another. Every word echoes, so I must sound startled too, and strange. Does my ex notice?
I’m sorry, I say.
He turns off a radio behind him. You’re what?
I never told you I was sorry.
That’s true, he says. He was my son too.
Tell your wife I said so, I say.
He sighs and starts to say something, but his voice breaks.
What is it?
It’s okay, he says. I forgive you.
I hold the phone and hold it tighter. It wasn’t my fault, I say. It was an accident.
I forgive you, he says again.
I can’t say anything.
So where are you? he asks. I called you about his savings account, but your office said you were gone.
On a boat, I say. A very strange boat, and I’m hoping it will get me to an airport. Please call my office and tell them I’ll be back in a week.
There’s silence on his side, an echo of silence. You still only care about work.
No — no. That never was true. You know that.
What? he says. I can’t hear you.
Listen, I say, the name of the boat is — what? She told me. I lean from the booth, but she’s not around to ask and there’s no sign. It isn’t about work, I say. Really. Tell them that on I’m this boat—
The echo girls have stopped. The echo girls sit back on their haunches and pick their teeth, bored with the actual transmission of information, and in a second I hear nothing at all from the other end, not even the insect swishing of static, of the electric wave tumbling. I say, It isn’t about work at all — but the phone is already dead.
I hit the phone. I hit it again because it doesn’t hurt enough the first time. I manage with number two to put myself in pain. I’m in pain, I’m in pain.
The man who lectures me, who says, That’s private property, ma’am, which I understand to mean I am private property, me, the one who’s in pain and hurt, not the jackass plastic, that I shouldn’t be misused, that man is, say, six years older than my son was, the size my son would have been in six short years, and this baby tells me it’s the only call I can make for three days and by that time we’ll be in port anyway, so relax. We can’t have everyone hanging on the line, he says, and maybe he pats the sucker or maybe he doesn’t, but the gesture is what boys learn with machines they love instead of women. He doesn’t, however, catch the way my face shifts in anger. He says, What about dinner, have you had it?
I do smell its grease, the kind that hamburger makes. After all those boiled roots and puddings, that vast pig, and those tins of fat and fish and salt and wet leather, this smell has its virtues, starting with the smell of home. Home fries, I hear him say as he herds me away from that phone. I hold my hurt hand that is all I have to remember of what I said, I wind down corridor after corridor, the smell stronger than the antiseptic, then the smell is there and the rest folds behind into memory in the presence of clicking plastic silver.
We walk in front of Day-Glo French dressing spread across equally bright greens, instant potatoes wallpaper-paste-fine topped with brown, a color that advertises a circle of meat somewhere below, ground from the tubes and ears of various short-lived creatures, all of which the server plops onto my plate in an almost musical series.
This boy I have come with touches me on the elbow to guide me past the plastic tree strung with red and gold bits of sprayed food — popcorn, macaroni, old bones? — to where the other hot ones eat. That’s where he thinks I want to sit. But I have to know more than what is stamped on the faces of the left-behind islanders, the six who now, removed from the island, removed from their clothes, show their necklaces and scars above their gray wraps, their faces flat with what’s been given them.
I say, Sit with me, it’s been a long time since I talked to someone from home, and I see him squirm and it’s all there: my exposure writ in his body’s flinch, the eyes’ denial that I’m a person standing in front of him, but enough like his mother that a sense of the filial lies in the way of total trashing. If only he had a video game to hide behind.
He’s got his orders, he sits me at another table. But he agrees to sit nearby, he’ll chat with me.
We talk islands and music and their music, as if they can’t talk about their own music. But they don’t want to talk about their music — or anything. The islanders barely eat. Their tests are just beginning, tests they can’t pass, I am thinking, the only tests they can get. Ngarima sits in front of her food, coughing, with a look on her face that I have seen in the snapshots Temu found, a look that says, Who could eat?