Nine Island (8 page)

Clicked, knowing this would slay hope.

Ahoy! Where are you? Back in Tropicana?

Yes!
I wrote fast, denying fury and hurt.

Wrote him about sea grapes, pink crabs like hands, diving trees, duck, and thought hard at the screen,
Leave your stone house, you fool, and bring your dog and come. I am for you, and you are for me. We can live the life!

Then I went back to polishing the story of the girl with the shark, getting up every ten minutes to nuzzle Buster, going back with fresh hope to the screen.

Finally:

Glad you're happily settled home! Enjoy la vida loca!

And back he trotted to the farmhouse, solo with the dog.

Well, Fury. You know how Fury came to be? A boy-god named Time sliced off his father's penis and threw it out to sea. As the penis zigged through the sky, one end spurted semen, the other blood. Drops of blood hit the sand and sank, and from them spouted Fury. From the froth that foamed and sputtered out of the tip came the goddess of erotic love.

Another version of the birth of that problem.

You've noticed the twinning in these etiologies. Fury + Love; Want Nothing + Want.

Anger and lust
.

I can't live either with or without you and don't seem to know my own mind
, says O.

Yeah, we all know about that.

N
EW MOOD:

A swimming pool, twilight. Let's make it the pool here, the one like a lopsided hourglass. Not dusk but dawn, pearly light. The water is deep, delectable, untruly blue. It looks like a pool of pure color. To touch it would not cause a ripple; you'd dip in a hand and be hued with blue light.

At least this is how it seems to the boy who's just arrived. A young boy, in these stories they're young, that's the point, at the age when . . . Fourteen, maybe fifteen. He has never been touched. A cerebral boy, and in his slim body is a mind intoxicated by purity, by ideas of a pool filled with light. If he could not have a body he would gladly be rid of it; he'd sublimate, slip free. He has not come from inside the building because
a boy like this doesn't live in a building; no, he skidded
from the sky and loped around the side of the building and triple-leapt the spiral steps, materialized here, out of breath. Now he stands on the lip of pure color. He himself is the color of limestone, fresh living rock just split. What's he wearing? Not much, faded trunks. He stands looking into the blue. Although he knows it isn't really light but water, he wants to will his belief true, so slowly dips his toes, dips until toes touch blue surface, tense light.

And the water—at his touch, the blue water trembles and softly sighs. You wouldn't hear it—this boy doesn't—but all the same, it sighs. This pool, you see, is feminine—

New mood, new stories. I'm moving down the list. From girls running away to what's at work in this one.

Desire.

Potency?

I'll fuck you, yeah. I'll fuck you
up
.

I don't really mean it. Just, please.

W
HEN THE SUN
had cranked around and flooded the pool with harsh unbearable light, I went in and up. Stepping out of the elevator, ran into the Frenchman who lives down the hall and is squat but stout and emanates heat. He walks fast and hard in shorts, with stocky furry legs and flip-flops, and bellows cheerily at the little dog trotting beside him. The dog likes me and today tried to run into my apartment when I opened the door; the stout Frenchman had to bark at him to make him come back. A few days ago the little boy whose grandparents (Jamaican?) live across the hall also tried to scoot inside. I don't know why. He has a clear and piping small voice, his name is either Brando or Marlon, his hair is a sweet dark tumble of coils, and he looks about three. I had passed him and his mother heading toward the elevator, and suddenly he stopped, pulled free of her hand, and trotted after me back down the hall. His dark eyes were round at my open door, and he seemed hypnotized, drawn by the light.

Come in, come in
, I chanted in my head.
Come be my little boy!
The words were streaming from my eyes and he was nearly pied-pipered in, but his mother snatched him away.

—If this boy by the pool had been smarter, yet less brainy, if he'd stepped back and looked, he'd have seen. Those hourglass curves? Of course it was female! And now the blueness of the water—because it is water with the warmth of blood, water that will lap around you and hold you or maybe let you sink—now, at his touch, the blue of the water deepens. Dip again, the water sings. Dip again, please do. He doesn't hear this but nevertheless does it, dips his toe, and strokes the surface, gently, raking a light and delicate swell. The pool, just perceptibly, trembles. It is so tense! And the pleasure of this touch is too . . . too much. When he strokes and dips again, the pool breathes more deeply, swells with need, and then, when he doesn't dive—too abrupt—he sits on the smooth white lip and slowly sinks one leg, then the other, and then, with a wriggle, drops himself to the hips into the warm blue, it does what it wants to: envelops him.

B
ALCONY, NIGHT.
Drinking more than O would like but not nearly enough for me.
Time and again I tell myself I'll stay clean . . .

The lower sky's full of glittering buildings, the bay's full of glittering boats, the water's full of echoes of both. In the upper sky, Orion tilts along with his belt and starry sword.

Below the sword, in Costa Brava's top-floor gym, two men and a woman run toward fogged glass. They look brave and serious as they gleam and stare west.

Five stories down and two windows over, a dinner party. The hostess gets up from the table and walks from room to room, windows lighting as she goes. Alone in the kitchen, she opens the fridge and assembles things at a counter. Three windows over, the guests lean close, an arabesque of light over their heads. The paintings behind them are deep red, green. She sets small plates on a tray that she now carries back from window to darkening window until the group at the table turn their heads, and she's with them again.

A corner apartment near Star Island is a bordello. This is a fact. A man will come out in underpants, with a cell phone, cigarette, and drink, looking sated as he gazes toward the island where Madonna sometimes lives. Then a bikinied woman or two might come out and lean against the railing, not near him, and smoke. Different women, different men, never a lot of clothing.

Up to the northeast, over the sea, a point of light grows in the sky. Behind it, a smaller point emerges from darkness. Behind this, another, smaller still. No matter when you look at night, always this configuration of swelling stars, as plane after plane flies down the shore and swerves westward at the Venetians.

Inside, Buster leans against a wall, swaying.

No other movement in my place.

No sign of life at all.

Maybe the digital clock on the stove ticking off minutes as they die, here in la vida loca.

Buster isn't even swaying; he's asleep at a slant.

Could stare at the cork floor and imagine swirling ocean depths.

Could look out at the ocean and imagine the same.

Could look down from this balcony to where boys shout
Fuck
.

Could look down down down to nada.

Sudden flare of blue light at my hand!

The Devil.

Might have business in that glam Miami of yours. Working on a deal with the Miami Heat. Not that you want to see me, but. I promise to be nice.

The problem with the Devil is that he was always good at sex.

Had a sudden full sense of his slick lips I used to like to slip my tongue between. And the way his tongue and all shot back, alive. No getting up from that bed.

Had to put down the cell and look at the sky for a minute.

NO
, wrote K.
Do not answer that message. Delete it. That man is poison. Your other old deadbeat is heartbreaking but this one is only poison.

Not a good idea
, my thumbs said to the Devil.

Of course it is
, his thumbs said back.

T
HIS EVENING I
brought a dish to fill from my water bottle, as well as a baggie of Grape-Nuts. Set dish near the duck's shrub and strewed cereal near my feet. Her black-bead eye looked at this but she didn't move. So I stepped back, and after a moment she waddled out of her shrub, first pecked cautiously at the nuggets, then gobbled. I crouched, balancing on my heels, and watched. When I thought I might touch her black barnacled head and tried, she shivered and scooted off fast. Left her searching for nuggets in the grass and walked the Venetian, timing walk to end when the board meeting began. Then snuck into the Bay Room.

The five board members sat at a long table facing the residents, glass wall of the bay and Star Island behind them. I've never got their names straight, although I've seen them in the lobby and elevators looking stuffed with import. The chair was droning into a microphone about contractors, as people in the audience muttered and stirred, when in the middle of a handout, Lino came
in. He wobbled forward in his white linen shirt and white pants and white hat. He got halfway up the aisle, then stopped and waved
his cane.

You, Harry! he shouted. You're a crook and a thief and you know it. Don't anyone believe a word he says!

Lino twirled around unevenly, still shaking his cane. Time for a new board! Call an election!

Lino, said one of the board members into his microphone, Lino, we're having a meeting here.

Same with you, Tom! Liars and cheats, all of you! Call an
election!

Lino, said Tom. Calm down.

Don't tell me to calm down! Don't tell me to calm down! You're planning a heist while you're still on top, and if you do I tell you what I'll do—

Lino . . .

—I'll have you killed!

Two of the board members stood up. That's enough, Lino, said one, and then the other was suddenly rounding the table shouting, You get the hell away from my wife!

Lino had veered toward a seated woman with a yellow bow on her head looking fiercely up at him.

You and your wife! Lino said. Have you all rubbed out!

All right, that's it, said Harry and banged his gavel, and in came the head of security, Virgil—his name really is Virgil—who is two feet taller and broader than Lino and very dark, with dark, sad eyes. He cupped Lino's elbow and steered him gently out of the Bay Room.

All right, said Harry.

Then the board went on with its business, Chairman Harry telling us all that was wrong with the pool and garage and koi ponds and jungle, the unsoundness of the concrete, the fact that cracks weren't just in the surface but symptoms of deep erosion, that the whole thing was about to collapse, taking koi and palms and gumbo-limbos and sunbathers and swimmers down with it, and as he spoke, an evil tiny smile on his face, it felt as though a tunnel were opening up and we were streaming into it, tumbling down into darkness, little naked Bosch figures, animals pitched from a sinking, split ark.

Two years of smashing and dust and blistering noise and
nine
million dollars, is that what he said? Did he say that?

I looked for N but couldn't find her among all the white-blond heads.

M
Y MOTHER WILL not go to Sunrise, she says. Absolutely not. Which is not yet bad news, there being the threat of increasingly negative funds thanks to the pool demolition.

But she will not even visit the place to
see
.

Why should I, she said. I'm not ready.

What about future preparedness? I said.

Future preparedness for what? she said.

For the
future
.

She was quiet, then said, That just doesn't make sense.

Tropical wind blew through the phone.

After a moment she said, I think you should just worry about your own self.

I can't help it! What if you fall? And you're lying there alone and nobody knows!

Well, I won't, she said. I never do.

Like everyone, a liar. Last year, a broken ankle. The year before, a wrist. And the bruises, blooming blue bruises on her forehead, her arms.

Oh, it's just the
Plavix
, she says. Never mind.

She won't even wear that alert thing around her neck. The pendant that'll send in the medics!

What is it like in that skull of hers, or in her hands or feet where the nerves have died? The horizon started tilting and she'd shake her head as if knocking water from her ears, but that made the world wobble worse. Gradually she could no longer feel the world, either: nerves turning to wood in her fingers and toes. Aiming a finger at a key to send out a word, she misses, concentrates, aims again, but it's too much, everything just keeps slipping, the world's forms tilting away. Does she want this now? Want it all to go?

O
VER AT COSTA BRAVA,
on a balcony on the seventeenth floor, a young woman who always wears vivid clothes has just come out with three other women, two men, a tray of drinks, and drums. They arrange themselves and toast and sip, and as I type right now they've begun to beat the drums and sing.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of aging intellect

(No, they're not singing a rendition of Yeats.)

Below them, darkened windows, just two with big lit screens, one flashing a man in a jungle, the other, two brides tearing each other's spumy dress. In an apartment to the right, three children jump on the sofa, skid on the floor, maypole around a potted palm, no adults in sight. Family probably just flew in from Peru, parents wrecked.

The bordello is dark tonight.

Straight across, though—what's this? A sudden low-lit movement of flesh the colors of an ice-cream sundae: couldn't make it out but the rhythm was clear. Time for binoculars. Hurried inside, got them, switched lights off for secrecy, and my magnified eyes roved across the building until I located the motion. Focused with thumbs: cluster of men. Hard to peel one from another. How many? A lamp gave just enough light—five boy-men, a sectional sofa, zebra-print rug, marble table. Silver wallpaper glimmered with the motions of flesh.