He could be blind.
He is not blind enough to wear the glasses they wear because he turns to me when I say, Captain, and he blinks pale eyes, I see them see me.
Doctor, he says.
Excuse me, doctor, I say. Of course he’s a doctor. That makes me fear him more, but I cast off that fear for later, when I have more time, when I don’t have someone looking at me or three shots of liquor inside. I want to go back, I say.
He spreads a chart over his knees, and it caves in the middle where the blue is, where it’s lined with circles inside circles inside circles. He stares at the map — to sort out the creases from the bull’s-eye?
You’re sicker than you think you are. But don’t worry, honey, he says without looking at me. Haven’t lost a patient yet. He snaps the chart taut and picks up another.
None of them? I ask.
You can think what you want, honey. He smiles at me, a dazzling smile, one with teeth, then he opens his new map, snaps that map shut. We have all the data.
He folds the map small.
One more thing, I say. Can I bum a few cigarettes from you?
He chuckles with an addict’s pity and hands over what’s left of his pack.
Part 4
~ ~ ~
He bolts the door behind me. I walk away slowly. He’s called for security — You like security, right? — to help me find my way back. I’m to stay right there.
I start to walk away quickly. I start to climb fast, then faster when I hear someone on the stairs. It, It, is what I hear in my head, I am It. I run all the way to the rail.
It is time to choose.
A good thing it is night. By day I would think it all out, lay each piece face up and add them. At night I can’t separate fear from fear. Besides, I am frightened by heights, I fear putting my head down and seeing whatever’s so far down, and I can’t see much but stars in this night. I still have what I drank as a comfort when I duck my head way down so when I jump it is not from a height but through all these stars.
I fall the way my son fell.
But into water.
I go so far down it feels as if I’m being pulled under by some deep-sea creature to make sure I never breathe air again. I fight my way up, and all that fight surprises me, maybe I wanted to just stay under, but I don’t, I’m star-side again and swimming. I don’t think about the sharks I disturb, the ones cruising the ship for its rain of leftovers, I gasp at the top, not thinking.
Someone rimmed by the light of the stars has heard me hit the water — she has, it could be her.
I gasp again, trying to be quiet. I’m now full of fear and now off the boat, and now what? I’m on the dark side, at least, where the moon isn’t. I’m not going to swim back to the island, I can’t get back on the boat. I swim over and touch the boat as if it’s base.
On the island, the islanders are practicing their dancing. I hear the clipped orders, the drums building, the tune about holiday stars that Ngarima sang on the beach with her Jesus. Does anyone hear me? Above, people collect and lean over. No, nobody, is what they say about my splash. But someone else — the woman, no doubt — says, Yes, with such assurance that they go to find lights. That’s what they shout out to get.
What rocks in my darkness? I paddle-crawl through the dark to find the lighter, the outboard end. I pull myself onto it, but I am used to someone pulling me in, and it takes me three tries plus my leg thrown over to get on.
By now lights make a plaid of the water, and I hear footsteps click on the ladder above the lighter. I turn the key that’s there and ready, I throttle and pull.
Boat driving is easy if you can see where you are going, if you can at least see the gears. Otherwise you bang the boat in reverse, you almost de-leg the man who is making his way clown to you, but all of a sudden all the light that is now on you lets you see and you go, jerking, off into the night.
You can’t get through the reef in the dark, but it’s not so dark anymore with all this light, all the light they need to launch another boat after yours, anyway I don’t think about what I can’t do, with the lighter moving so well beneath me and turning when I turn. So when the white-headed surf rears up, I find my way, I don’t think of myself and the boat mangled and turned on its sharpness — I just go.
Not that I make it. The boat flips in the surf, and I capsize fast, foam and coral and some very hard wood hit me as the boat goes down. I’m senseless in a light-dark-light moment, the foam and dark sprayed into the spotlights the boat casts out for me. But when I surface, all banged up, I’ve been shot on a wave into the utter dark past the reef.
How can I swim? It’s nothing. I do it with my legs and arms, I flail like that small-headed boy in the lagoon. When I find I can’t breathe I hope to touch that soft monster sponge, but of course I don’t. Did I imagine it anyway? I don’t know what I do but splash and gurgle in a direction that might be forward — there — is that dark part land? Is that tin basin reflecting their light, or is it the moon? A streak of light bounces with drumming far away.
Pain comes so suddenly to my leg that it doubles me up. It must be a nail from a wreck, but next there’s an electric jab into my foot so bad that I can’t straighten it out, I am gone with pain, so far beyond the banging up I’ve just had on the reef that I take on water.
A wave, a lucky wave, tears me out of it, goes the right way, the way I think of as right where I come from, where I must go back to, a kind of amniotic wave, a slap-on-the-bottom wake-up wave that makes you cry out, outraged, and live.
~ ~ ~
You think we didn’t notice the ship all lit up and the sirens going? Harry hovers over me. A boat with horns like Jehovah blowing?
I move my head as if I might laugh with him, but no, it is impossible to laugh, I can’t laugh, I can’t even move my mouth very well.
Barclay saw you. What does he have to do now but walk the shore all night and wait?
What? What? I say. This is all I can say, and point at my feet, which are bandaged and itchy and hot.
You should be dead, says Harry. Or at least gone, with them, rescued as it were. What happened to you was you hit a taramea, a fish so poisonous we had to use gloves to pull the spines out.
A poison fish? I say, pulling hard at my mouth muscles to get to the p.
Harry sits on a mat beside me. I see it is his mat.
I saved you from them later, says Veelu, who leans into my vision with Milo in a half coconut.
I sip.
Show her how, says Harry. This is the saving after the fish, when they came to the island to get you back — you, their prize experiment. They swarmed the place, I thought the island would sink under their weight — or that they’d find me and take me instead.
Why didn’t they? I try to say.
Veelu lifts her arms, removes a pin from her hair on top, and shakes her head. Veelu’s large hair, so mane-wild and black-silked, falls off and down her back, and her own hair, the little she grows, stands in surprised wisps in small clumps over a head scarred in parallel rows. You like it? I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair, she sings. And send him on his way.
She waves the wig. They give this to my sister in a box, and it is all she has to send me. When the ship people see me without it, when they see the scars the boat has left me with, they don’t bother me. You stay here too long, I say, and they’ll do it to you too. They believe me when I say you are in the surf, finished.