Nine Island (18 page)

N turned away. I try not to talk about it. I hate talking about it, but then.

I'm sorry, I said. I wish—

She raised a thin yellow hand.

I'm sorry, P said, about your cat.

Realized I'd never thanked him for the hammerhead, so did.

What's this? He gave you a
shark
?

A photo, P said. She didn't believe they were down there. There's probably one right now.

We all looked over the balcony rail, toward the bay, its silverblack gleams.

Well, of course she should believe you, N said. Just like you have to believe me. Even though it's
invisible
. Sometimes we have to take people at their word.

I do believe you, N, he said. You know that.

I know, she said, I know. I'm sorry. These
drugs
. She shook her head hard. Although honestly I don't know how you can, she said. When you can't see any signs of it—and that
doctor
, what he insists—how you can believe . . .

He put his hand on her arm. She took a breath, a sip, and we all looked again at the bay.

From up there the river in the water was clear, a different color, the sea current that rushes through the Government Cut. I thought of that drowning man and told them.

Right there, I said. In the current.

Christ, P said. Lucky you saw him and called.

But I didn't. I didn't have my phone. I just—

That man, said N, a few weeks ago? Is that what you're talking about? I only just realized what you were talking about.

You saw him?

Sure. I'm sitting out here all the time.

What did you do?

Well, actually I heard him before I saw him.

Why didn't you tell me? said P.

What's to tell?

What's to tell? That a man's drowning and needs help!

But what did you do? I said.

What do you think?

You called?

Of course.

You're the one who called?

Sure, she said.

P looked at her. You saved him, he said.

So I picked up the phone, N said. What's the big deal? You dial three little numbers! You don't let somebody
drown
.

The clouds smoldered, edges flaming, long rays of light.

No, said P. That's true.

As if I need to tell you two that, said N. You, who've taken care of Buster forever, to say nothing of that
duck
. And this man who takes such care of me. This good good good
good
man— Here, she said, I'll even give you my olive.

Only because you hate the olive!

She was laughing and reaching to him when suddenly there came that look in her eyes. He took her hand, held it locked.

After a moment she said, Well, will you just look at that sky. But wait a minute. Wait a minute. I just remembered. P, tell her about what happened during the storm the other day.

That was something.

Tell her.

It was . . . what, last Monday?

Just as the storm was coming, said N.

And I thought I had at least an hour—

See how wrong you were? I told you, I could see, it was moving fast—

So anyway, he said, I was down in the boat—

He said he
had
to tie something, said N.

In the what? I said.

The boat, said P.

I never mentioned it? said N.

Right down there, said P.

Here?

Down to the left.

The green one?

No. Beside it.

Red?

Enough already, said N. Tell her.

I need another drink first. Anyone?

Nodded.

P refilled our glasses and, as the sky behind him slowly darkened over the ruined jungle and the bay where a hammerhead might be swimming, and the island where a girl might be walking into the HAREM house, and the next island where a man might be stepping out of the ground, and the water between islands where a man might be standing and rowing into the dusk, and as I tried to erase my secret pictures of the man in black who was P, he told what happened in the storm.

He'd been in the boat as it rolled in, trying to do something to make the boat safe, which he explained in detail but I quit following. The boat had been rocking hard, lurching side to side so that he could barely stand, when suddenly there was a shattering crack: electricity branched from the sky, struck his antenna, and threw him back, a tree of light as the bolt raced down the rod and into the water, shot out in lines to the depths.

When he was finished telling, it had fallen dark. No twilight in Miami. Boats bobbed, their bouncing lights and the lights' liquid ghosts. The city skyline was lit red, white, and green. The huge bright girl danced alone in the air with her swinging hair and hips and boots. P looked at his hands, cradled in his lap.

Christ, I said.

I still can't believe it, said N.

Me neither.

That you didn't get the bolt itself.

No.

We were silent, sipping our drinks.

But I'll get the boat fixed, said P. And when it's fixed, we'll take you out. That be fun?

Yes, I said. Yes. Please.

And I saw N smile in the dark.

On the way to my apartment, I stopped at the landing outside and looked down to the glittering black bay, to where the palm frond had become a shark, and pictured the hammerhead, swaying its scalloped head as it searched the lightless deep.

Back in my apartment, with no Buster, just a little black form waiting in his nest, I slid open the glass doors and went out to the balcony. Costa Brava, where no one seemed to be home, hurricane shutters blanking most of the windows, and beyond it, the thin strip of lit city, and beyond that, beyond the invisible beach, the black sea beneath the dark sky.

Blue glow at my hand.

I wish I knew how to help her. I don't. Don't answer, please—there's nothing to say. I just have to say it sometimes.

Far out at sea, heat lightning. A silent splinter of light, a lingering flare.

D
ROVE OVER TO the Beach, north up Collins to the Forties. Got out, walked to where the sand is almost white, and filled a bag. At home, poured the sand into a small box and carefully placed Buster there as if he were lounging on the beach. He would never have lounged on the beach—the one time I took him there, thinking he'd gambol after pipers or crabs, he clung near my feet like a tight plush shadow in all that bleached space. But now he looked peaceful, paws crossed, long white whiskers and eyebrows alert. I stroked his long ears and tender cheeks, then fastened the lid. Put a ribbon around the box and held the box close as I rode down to the mezzanine, the flamingo mirrors and slow stirring fans, out through the last strip of jungle, around the spiral staircase, to the far corner of the dock. Knelt, rested the box on the milky green water, whistled a little from
Last Tango
, let go. The box tilted, bubbled, sank.

My apartment's so still now. No howls, no puddles or diapers, no purr. Walked through it barefoot feeling for whiskers or eyebrows left on the cork. Found five and glued them into my Oxford edition of O.

Now there's nothing but O. Just sink into his words, his golden crossed lines, their patterns and sounds, and through them to his figures, a girl writing a bold note to her brother, a boy touching a pool's delicate skin. All those girls and boys two thousand years old: but still here with me, still alive, still changing. Each phrase sinks into my eyes and blood and after a time emerges new, in another language, an altered tale, but these words feel, they really do feel, like him, his voice, my O.

Came out to the balcony and looked down at the glittering world for a while, then up at the deepening blue. No boys are falling into the sea, only star-planes coming and coming. Went inside for dinner, a drink. Now light-strung cruise ships pass through the Government Cut and slip into liquid night.

And maybe, you know, my O is enough. Maybe it's not bad to love so much what another mind made.

A kind of marriage, maybe.

H
AVE BARELY SEEN N and P since that night. No pool deck to find them on anyway, but they seem even further removed than that, locked in something alone. I did run into her in the elevator and was startled and said, How
are
you? But her pink-rimmed eyes turned to tears, she opened her mouth but shook her head and walked out as soon as she could.

From my balcony I sometimes see her and P in the park, though, walking slowly along the path. She's so frail he holds her elbow.

It's hard not to look away. Yet an afterimage burns: P, strong and alive, walking with a skeleton. An ugly thing to think, but I can't help it, and you can tell other people see this, too.

Went upstairs last week with a book I'd promised her, but as I was about to knock there came from inside a sound—a keening. I hesitated, set the book against the door, walked back down the hall. Before I'd turned the corner, their door opened with a flow of light, and P stepped out. He didn't see me. He stood in the hall, door shut behind him, pressing his hands to his eyes.

Have left a new book every few days since then. I send messages, too, but she doesn't write back, won't answer the phone.

But P was in the garage today, that underworld now ripped with light where the pool's frame has been stripped of concrete.

N doesn't mean to be rude, he said. She just can't—she can't be with people these days. If she opens her mouth there's only one thing she can say.

And—

He shook his head and turned to go, but stopped.

Did you know I met her in college? he said. Yep. She was sitting on the green with a notebook, I looked over, she looked up, that was it.

He laughed a little, pushed the button for the grate to rise, ducked under it to the blaze.

Y
OU'VE SEE
N trees
that twine together. Maybe you know this story. It's almost the last I'll tell. Those entwined trees, often two dogwoods, one with coral flowers, the other ivory: do their trunks actually meld? Can they? Can skin become porous? This story's not about young people—we've had enough of them. Two old people, a long time wed. So used to each other, even their movements have grown the same, their hair, their hands, their gaits. Although sometimes you see old couples that are fantastically unlike: a rail of a man with a woman so bent she sees only her feet; he is her periscope as they inch on. Often saw this couple from my window in Germany. Anyway, this other pair, when they look at each other, can no longer remember the difference between them, and what they'd felt when they first saw each other—maybe on a green, one sitting reading, the other balancing on a rope tied between trees before he saw her and fell—what they felt that first moment, they do still. With more complexity now, layers of sediment and time, but pretty much the same. So. It is now many years after that first sighting. They have grown old, and it is almost time. She is sick. Neither can bear it. One night, each of them, alone, not wanting to worry the other, looks up at the stars and whispers the same hope.

Somewhere in the distance, a glow.

In the morning, the wife is much weaker. She looks at her husband, he looks at her, in all eyes is panic, their fingers interlace—but then somehow they lace even more, these fingers strangely longer than usual, longer and somehow not feeling the same, but twisting and twining about one another! The husband and wife look on, amazed, as those fingers now grow velvety green and sprout small glossy leaves, their hands and wrists start turning vine—so do their arms and breasts, bellies and chest, their two bottoms, four legs, and then their faces can only look at each other and say Oh! and smile through tears of sap before they too are green and gone in stem and leaf, growing and twining still closer, closer, and there will be no end.

J
UST NOW, out at sea, a flare of lightning. Haze around a jag of light, and in it I see N. In the next one, I see P.

A
FINAL TRY to capture the duck. Did not go prepared. Just saw her as I approached the verge and couldn't stand it, had to catch her, grab her, take her somewhere else.

Dusk, the grassy verge, the blades moist and tickling, my FitFlops making the thwack at which she turns her head. She waddled toward me as I came near, my eyes on one of her pink-rimmed black eyes, Grape-Nuts in a baggie in hand. I did not go to our usual meeting point but stopped in the middle of the grass, crouched, strewed kernels, then moved backward, drawing a path of grains that would Hansel-and-Gretel her to me. She gobbled from the first pile, followed the trail five or six inches—but then sensed something and lifted her head. Only four paces from my knees. I should have waited until she came. I should have just been patient.

But couldn't stand it. I tightened, then sprang—

And the duck: she flapped and suddenly wobbled up into the air. She beat her wings hard and wobbled and rose, careened right at me so I had to crouch, then flew above me, rose higher, higher, began to soar, swerved from the verge, and wheeled over the bay.

I sat on the grass and cried.

When I got home, two police cars were again parked on the ramp, blue lights spinning soundless. I went around back to walk along the dock and look as always into the water. When I spiraled up the steps to the last strip of paradise jungle, three policemen stood by the windows near the gym, yellow tape on the ground.

T
WO PEOPLE SLOWLY cycling in our gym on the mezzanine, two people staring west through the glass as they pedaled, saw N when she fell.

Although she didn't fall. You don't fall off a balcony on the twenty-second floor. You get up from your chair, push it to the railing, climb up, maybe balance on the edge a minute, look over, look back, look away. Then you decide it's time.

The two saw a crash in the green.

The police had to take a picture and show it to people in apartments all the way up to the twenty-second floor before they found someone who knew N. It was the woman above me, the one with the garden, who finally said who she was.