“Hope he’ll be all right,” Constance said. She fixed Natasha with a stony look. “I’m not as drunk as you think.”
“Oh, what can it matter?” Natasha said to her.
“Well, I’m quite drunk enough, though. But look at ’m. He’s just passed out. Pissed, as they say.”
The medics got Skinner onto a stretcher and took him out of the place. He was more alert now, eyes open, taking people in as he was carried past them. Natasha looked around for Mrs. Skinner but could no longer see her. “Where did the wife go?” she asked Constance, who was moving unsteadily toward the elevators.
“Got on her broom and rode away, I guess.”
They stood by the elevators, Constance leaning on the wall there, head down, pale and clearly tired. The elevator door opened, and she got on, put her hands on the small faux-wooden railing inside, then turned and looked bleakly out. There was no recognition in her face, no sense that she saw anything or anyone.
“Remember,” she said gravely. “They don’t allow tourists in th’ place b’fore nine-thirty.” The doors closed on her.
7
Natasha returned to the beach. The moon shining through a hole in the clouds made shadows of the palms. There were no planes in the sky, and though the palm fronds clicked when the breezes moved them, the quiet seemed deeper. The sea shimmered under the silver light, and she saw the silhouette of a passing ship out on the horizon, making its way east, probably with cargo. There was a faintly glimmering flash of movement in the water. Something jumped, and jumped again. A school of porpoises was swimming by, phosphorescence flickering in their wake. She had a moment of knowing that Faulk was safe wherever he was. Near the water she sat down on the damp, packed sand, supporting herself with both hands. So many people were suffering across the miles of darkness. The thought of her dead parents came to her, gone before she could have any memory of them, two young people in love, planning to have several children — according to Iris, they had wanted a large family — and the world had taken them. And now she could not unthink the possibility that this feeling of relief about Faulk was a great irony, and that the world had already taken him as well. She began to entreat the sea and sky, murmuring the words, “Please let it be all right.” And the loss of her parents seemed mingled with this badness, all part of the same pitiless chance. Everything was exaggerated by the fact that she could not find out, could not know for certain. And even as she recognized the morbid indulgence of the fear, it raked through her. She could not change it or make it stop. Because what if he really was gone? All that fire and falling debris, and why could she not get through to him?
In her peripheral sight she saw a stirring nearby, a startling sudden movement that turned out to be a shape stumbling in the uneven pockets of sand toward the water.
Nicholas Duego.
And he had just seen her, veering in her direction. He stopped and fumbled with something in his shirt pocket. A cigarette. She watched him light it and then come on. “Hello,” he said. “I wondered where you went.”
“If you don’t mind I’d rather be alone.”
He seemed not to have heard. He sat down about three feet from her, elbows resting on knees, saying nothing, and not looking at her but at the moonlight on the water. After drawing on the cigarette, he offered it.
“I don’t smoke.”
“It is not tobacco.”
She stared at him a moment, then took it, drew deeply on it, and handed it back.
“It is the only thing that relaxes me,” he said. “When I want to relax. Sometimes I would rather not relax. For that I have other things.”
She blew the smoke out and briefly had to fight the need to cough. Sitting back and looking at him, she said, “Really.”
He smiled. “You are not used to the smoke.”
She had the feeling that he was trying to impress her. She almost laughed. “I guess you’re a bad character.”
He offered the joint.
“Right,” she said.
“I am not bad, no. I am a good man.”
“That’s nice to know.”
They smoked for a few minutes in silence, passing the roach back and forth. She wasn’t thinking about anything but relief from the whiskey-dimmed funk she was in, and it came to her that in its way this was similar to those passes in the bars and clubs of Washington when there was just the blankness of herself in the instant, just the time and place, no history or thought of a future, either, but only the counterfeit brightness of the exact present. The sky shifted before them, the clouds moving, and she could not think of the clouds as anything but emptily pretty things that did not apply to her. There was only this very minute itself: a squall out at sea, water lifting and settling, night with its terrors beyond the line of the horizon, far away.
“I have more,” Duego said, holding out a little plastic bag. “Should I roll us another one?”
She watched him do it, saying nothing, and kept the one he’d given her, taking another hit from it, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, the coal burning very close to her flesh now. It was almost gone.
During
Islands
1
He offered her more, and she took it, gazing at the slowly vanishing lunar radiance on the water. You could still see small glimmering traces of it on the shifting surface, thousands of white wings. Marijuana after alcohol made her woozy, as if she had just awakened from a long sleep. But her vision seemed sharper, and her senses, her nerve endings, were tingling. She thought idly of the phrase having a buzz on.
He was talking, going on about something.
Food, she realized.
“I like things cooked dark. Crisp and brown.”
She looked at the side of his face, a handsome Latin face, with a sharp nose and high cheekbones, and coal-black hair. She felt nothing. Yet when she handed him back the joint, and he rested his other hand on her shoulder, she did not remove herself. The moonlight was dying, shrouded in folds of cloud. She put her knees up and rested her head on them.
The other took a hit and said, “I did not speak English until I was ten years old.”
She sniffled. “You told us that. Please leave me alone.”
“I think if you talk to me you will feel better.”
She did not speak.
He went on smoking, holding it in, then letting go, blowing the smoke. He held the joint out to her. “I am a dancer.”
“You told us.”
“I never liked it as a child.”
“Dancing.” She took another toke and handed it back.
“I did not like America. In my country there was a very strong official hatred of it. But my father felt differently. He worked for Americans before the revolution. My mother was Canadian. He wanted to go be an American or a Canadian. But I was a boy and I had friends. I did not want to leave my friends. In the house, when I was small, as long as I can remember, he talked about going to North America, and I have memories of them fighting about it. And then my mother died. I did not know when we went to Canada to visit her family that it was to go to America to live. A friend in America helped him.”
She could think of nothing in response. And then she simply dismissed the worry about it. Mentally, she dismissed him. “Do you still hate America?” Her voice was flatly automatic.
He appeared momentarily affronted. “I am a citizen.”
“Ever heard the phrase America, love it or leave it?”
He laughed. “I could have made that up. It could have been me. Because I love America. It gave me the chance to be a dancer.”