Nine Island (9 page)

I'm floating eyes, floating eyes, I've been transformed to floating eyes!

Put down the binoculars, set hands on table. Felt them there, warm and taking up living space.

Felt lower self sitting in chair doing same.

Poor old lower self.

Far at sea, beyond Costa Brava and over the bay, beyond the lit buildings on the Beach, in the dark liquid distance: heat lightning. A silent flash, delicate jag at its heart. The sky dark and still for a moment, then another silent flash. Beautiful, each jag and flash at sea, flare dissolving like cloud.

A
RE WRITTEN WORDS
part of the problem? Translating, transmuting, part of the problem? Did words swim alone in people's heads before writing was invented—I mean, did words exist in silence before writing, or never until they'd been blown past the teeth? Homer, was it different then? Or has everyone always been a private pool of silent swimming words?

S
TILL ALIVE
down there?
wrote the Devil.

Well, this is an excellent time for words to stay silent inside my head, not be sent by treacherous thumbs to the Devil.

F
IRST THE CLUSTER
of young men last night, and this morning: by the pool lay two men on lounge chairs who I
know
don't live here. Obviously guilty, they'd snuck in. Which you can do. You can slink by the basketball/tennis courts over where the fence comes closest to the building but leaves just enough room, slither through to the dock, and then casually spiral up the staircase like any civilian resident, because the lock has been broken for years. Virgil shakes his head and sighs at it. These men were the breed who make women invisible, but this made them easy to watch. I was swimming, and each time I clutched the rim to gasp, I let my invisible binocular eyes stray over to spy. Between laps one of the men got up lazily and disappeared into the men's spa while the other smoked, looking up now and then toward the door to the spa; the first one came out and strolled back to his friend. They said something, and the other got up and walked to the spa. I swam three laps and was in the deep end clutching the rim and panting when he came out. He looked altered, loose in the hips.

Lots going on in the spa, he said to his friend, who looked at him, grinned, shook his head, got up, and went back in. The other one lay down, lifted a knee, lit a cigarette, let his free hand drop.

Nasty
,
part of me thought, winging and frogging fast to the shallow end. Hmm, thought another part. What if I could go into the spa after swimming, all wet, with my blood warm and rushing, and maybe not turn on the light but glide over the tiles in the dark and rise up the altar steps to the hot tub, and maybe it's already bubbling and dreamy, and once I've stepped in the warm water and wiggled down and am getting steamy and expansive I discover, oh! another body in there with me?

I leaned on the cracked lip of the pool trying to decide: man or woman in the tub? Usually it would be a man at this point in the fantasy, but this was the women's spa, and the idea of a woman with wet slippery breasts seemed good.

Plunged on.

Yes yes yes, a warm, wet body is in the bubbling water behind me, and hands suddenly find my hips and pull them to him, okay, sorry, it's a him, and his legs come up on either side so warm and strong, and he pulls me to him and then has more hands and they each rise over my belly and just under my breasts and linger, as I lean forward to get my breasts to touch them, and then the hands understand and decide to tease and hold themselves out just in front of my nipples in the warm bubbling water and then glide by . . .

S
O HERE'S A
new question: do I have a choice, at this point?

Not counting, of course, the Devil.

Floating and floating in the hourglass pool . . .

Lotion and sunblock and skin cells of me, seeping into the water, sinking through the pool's deep belly, dripping down into the cave.

Another etiology, Hesiod again: he puts Desire in the world at the very start, created only moments after primal Void.

Aloneness did not have a chance.

J
UST AS I GOT to the part of a story where a beautiful boy who wants nothing (Narcissus: a.k.a.
you
, Sir Gold) dissolves into his quicksilver self, water splashed my balcony table. Not even in the corner where it had drizzled last time, where I'd set the corn plant I found in the trash room and rescued, a corn plant that still had a single live leaf so was not yet completely dead and thus deserved, like many deadbeats, my love.

I slapped shut the laptop, glared at the balcony above, went inside, stalked through my apartment and down the hall, took the stairs two at a time, and knocked on the door of that lady: silence. Went back downstairs, wrote a note, ran back up, and slid it under her door, panicking that she'd swing open the door just then and charge me with cowardice. As I hustled back down the hall, N rounded the corner.

Well hi, she said. Were you coming to see me?

Told her about the water woman.

She
seems
nice, N said. She does have a lovely garden on her balcony. But I can understand how annoying that must be. Do you want me to intervene?

(Shook head.)

Why don't you come in, she said. Have some coffee.

(Ovid ticking in my chest.)

One little cup of coffee, she said.

N's apartment, on the other side of the building from mine, looks over the paradise jungle and brilliant blue bay, Monument Island, the city, the ships. I gazed a long time as she made coffee, then was looking straight down all those stories at the greenery and path when N came back.

Tried touching the duck last night, I said.

No luck?

She's fast. I gave her Grape-Nuts, put them near my foot, and she came over and bobbed for a minute, then started to eat, and I was sure I could grab her, but no. She waddled off and dropped into the bay. But even if she got to Rivo Alto, there aren't any ducks there, either. Or fresh water, except maybe somebody's pool. What I realized then is that someone else is leaving her food: by her shrub was a dish of cat food.
Cat
food.

That can't be very good for her.

It's disgusting. Whoever it was left an empty bottle, too, actually a few.

Just tossed?

It looks like they might have brought her water and then left the bottles. So I'm going to put a note in one.

N looked at me. A message in a bottle?

Saying
We need to save this duck!
and giving my number.

Well, said N, it'll certainly be interesting to see if anyone responds.

I'm hopeful.

Now this duck is intriguing, she said, but to tell the truth I'd rather know a little more about other things.

I told her about the cluster of men across the way and the men going in and out of the spa.

Well, she said, that's also interesting and does not surprise me one bit. This is
Miami Beach
. But what I want to know, she said, is about
you
.

Told her about my mother and the labyrinthine problem. Then, after nudging, told her about the deadbeat men. Sir Gold, the Devil. Didn't mention husband, much.

N, like K, thought I ought to meet
new
men.

Look at you, she said. You're desirable. You could have . . . all sorts of opportunities.

Her phone rang, and when she went inside, I looked again at the water, islands, city, sky. Up where all those siren ions once sang their song of hope. A pair of pelicans soared by, coasting so close you could almost touch the ashy fur of their breasts, beaks like oily shell.

When N came out again she said, Is it a fear of flying?

I shook my head. Her wing's clipped.

N smiled the slow smile. I wasn't talking about the duck, she said. See? You're too young to even know what I'm talking about.
Fear of Flying
. The
book
. Look it up, smarty. I was talking about you.
The unknown, she said. You know. Letting yourself go, all that junk. That's what you're afraid of.

Sure, I said. Who isn't.

Oh, I don't know, she said, sometimes— But just then her face, with its disturbing wide smile and liquid eyes, her face like a beatific jackal, got pulled by that pain inside her. She placed a large thin hand on either side of her chair, eyes focused nowhere.

Okay, well, she said. I know you've got lots of work to do. It's nothing. The usual. See you soon.

T
HIS EVENING
on the Venetian, message rolled up in my pocket, I saw again the runner whose whole body is tattooed, at least the skin not hidden by shorts. Have always thought the patterns were paisleys, but when he passed close, saw they were the seams and striations of red and blue meat—tattoos of the muscles inside.

So as I walked and tried to kegel, of course I thought of “The Human Body”: that exhibit of people who'd donated their dead selves to be skinned, preserved, and mounted for view.

It started in Germany when I lived there. Then it traveled all over the world, a caravan of skinless bodies in elaborate poses. Midstride, odalisque, midfuck. I think one peeled body was hitting a volleyball.

It happened to be curated by the husband of my doctor.

And as soon as I thought of it, even the balmy Biscayne Bay air wasn't strong enough to overcome the smell of that waiting room in Heidelberg, the waiting room in the
Frauenklinik
. The other fruitless women, bitter with added hormones and subtracted caffeine, sat in wooden chairs against the walls and waited, the floor muddy, smell of old wet stone and must. Every so often a door in the corner would open and a voice would cry
Die nächste,
and
the next woman would get up and look back at us waiting and go into a lit room for blood to be drawn, then into a dark room to take off her pants and lie back and let the probe be jabbed in and tooled around to see if any grapelets were growing. We were to get up and go in the order we'd come, and it was our job to know this order, so each looked up fast when a new harried woman appeared at the door, to be sure she knew her place. I'd memorize each woman's face, look at the other slumped waiting bodies, and gradually think of the people who'd donated their dead selves to my doctor's husband, the room slowly blurring into a tableau of peeled bellies and heads.

By now I'd reached the green verge on the other side of the drawbridge, the duck standing in her station, gazing bravely north at the bay. As soon as she hears my FitFlops now, she starts waddling to our meeting point by the sea grape. I strewed Grape-Nuts and poured water into the dish, and as she shucked her fear and darted close to begin eating inches from my foot, I tried again to touch her—fingers nearly on her shiny black feathers—but she flapped away, affronted. Okay, okay. Under the shrub was a plastic bottle; I slid my message inside and tied a pink ribbon around the neck.

Hello, whoever is feeding this duck—please call! We have to save her.

At the next island
, o
n one broad square of pink concrete, two tiny anoles wriggled entwined. At my bad-luck footfall, they scratched away quickly into the grass.

G
O
OD NEWS!
The labyrinthine-brain coral continues to live, down by
Paradise Found
. I squatted in the sun for a time to watch it waver through clear green water.

All those coiling passages. Brains, intestines, inner ears.

Female passages, too.

Hysterosalpingogram being a good, if sad, way to see them.

Uterus-salt-dye-picture.

Which I've been thinking and thinking about again, ever since the Human Body ran by.

You lie on your back in a room lit by little lights on machines, same room as always or maybe an earlier dim room in another city or country, because this went on an awfully long time, and you watch as the doctor's hands say
Go,
and up inside you flows the ink, branching in ever tinier tributaries, like a water land shining in the dusk. And if the ink travels far enough, you know that this at least is not the problem.

In the museum across the street from our apartment, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, was a glass sculpture of the viscera of a shark. My favorite thing there. A glassy tumble so large on the scuffed floor in cool northern light that it took time to circumambulate. Its kidneys, liver, intestines, and heart, translucent, fragile, and clean.

A
FTER WORKING
late last night, needed
out
and went down to the dock. Gazed at the dark glittering bay to the cityscape of red, green, white lights, up to the blowing tropical sky, ripped clouds lit blue by the moon. Then something suddenly came to life on the tallest distant building: a twenty-story dancing girl made of LED lights. I leaned elbows on deck rail and watched her swing her pony mane, wriggle her hips, kick her white boots.

Light-Emitting Diode
: like a tiny bright creature in surf.

When I came in at the side entrance by the Dumpsters, where Tina in Receiving has her crosses and saints, a trio emerged from the dark: small mothy Lino and two girls like the light-girl. Their cheekbones in the street lamp were Russian. The girl on Lino's left had blond hair, the girl on his right had red, their breasts the height of his nose. He'd picked them up? They'd picked him? Over his white hat they looked at each other, then each slipped a hand through a crook'd arm, and the three went into the building.

I waited, invisible, by the Dumpsters until the freight elevator had taken them.

Lino lives in the Tower, I happen to know. It's better even than the Penthouse, marked on the elevator panel as T.

I have not yet dared go up there.

I mean, I barely dare come in through the lobby.