Paradise Park (6 page)

That was a magic time among those disappearing islands. I knew it even then, down on my knees among the bird people, the boobies. Their black eyes absorbed me, and their small heads, just the way the boobies held themselves against the wind, and took turns on their nests
in twenty-four-hour shifts, mates flying in with wet feathers and food nipped from the sea. Their calls to one another, as much as the waves, filled my ears. That was a place of great teaching; that was really an open university. The lectures were all from the birds, the research was all done on foot, and the learning wasn’t done in words, but all by hand.

I remember one day I was working with Brian observing on a rock ledge. The sun was beating down. There wasn’t anything to break the wind or absorb heat there on those barren rocks. Brian and I crouched down, and there was a booby, and we were close, but quiet, and I saw something stir, and the mother bird was moving and shifting, and she opened up her wings a little like she was flapping a white parasol, and then Brian touched my arm, but I already saw that Mom’s chick was hatching, and I saw that in the hot sun she was shading the chick with her body and her wings. She was her baby’s own awning. “Like a beach umbrella,” I whispered. But Brian put his fingers to my lips, and then we watched together and we didn’t say a word.

We almost forgot ourselves in deference to the birds. It stopped mattering who was a professor, and who a student, and who might have been the girlfriend of a student. There was this mystical silence that grew up among us, because we were all listening and looking so hard at nests. And that was my first glimpse of the world, I mean, the creation: the heavens and the earth, and the birds in between. In the mornings we all sat up and saw the sun rise, all of us, the humans unzipping tents, and sitting up in sleeping bags, the birds, alert in their nests, built up just off the ground from bracken. In the morning light the ocean spread out around us and you felt how the land was just a speck out there in the water, the ocean tides sucking, sucking the teeny shore just like the island was sucking candy. You felt out there under that blue sky and in that sea you might actually be resting in the palm of God.

What broke the spell was, we all got mites. Tiny red mites lived on the birds, and those mites started hatching in our hair. Then everyone forgot about the birds and the work and the ocean and we cursed and jumped and screamed and were just about ready to murder each other, until Brian rationed out the expedition’s official mite-killing shampoo. We washed our hair with the primitive shower we’d rigged up. Just a plastic bag we filled with salt water. You held it up above your head and squirted the water down at you, which left your hair sticky—but
since we’d brought all our drinking water with us, we couldn’t exactly afford to waste it on our hair.

Unfortunately for me, what the bugs really went for was my long straight hair. Everyone else had short hair on that trip, which now I could understand, because even after I shampooed, I had mites’ eggs all up and down my scalp, and bugs nesting in my roots. That shiny smooth slippery hair that used to sweep around when I was dancing was crawling with mites. Everyone else was rid of them, but I couldn’t wash or comb or pick all those bugs out. Rich took his sleeping bag out of our two-man tent and moved in with Geoffrey, because, obviously, he didn’t want to get reinfested. That’s when Imo said to me, all crisp, “You’ve got to cut it off.”

“My hair?”

“Of course, your hair,” Imo said. “What else do you think I’m talking about?”

But this just goes to show my vanity or foolhardiness or something like that. I waited a whole day after Imo spoke to me before I could face cutting off my hair. I waited and waited, hour after hour, even though I felt like I had a Medusa head and all the tresses of my hair were writhing snakes. I kept limping around while Imo rolled her eyes, and Geoffrey had a horrified but fascinated look in his, like he didn’t want to stare but he couldn’t help it. Like in his mind he was already composing a description for his next letter to Julie. Rich wouldn’t go near me or any of my stuff. Still it took me a whole day to go to Brian and ask for the scissors from the first aid kit.

I don’t know what it was—the way I asked for it—or the fact that he didn’t want me using the good scissors. Brian had been working on his notes, squatting down with his clipboard, but when I spoke to him, he jumped to his feet, as if to say, I’ve had it! He got the big old shears he used for cutting rope, and he gathered all my hair in one hand and he cut that whole thick pile in one stroke. He kept cutting bunches and fistfuls as short as he could, until I had nothing more than tufts and stubble on my head and a whole pile of hair on the ground, more hair than you would have imagined, like the kind of mess you make when you’re husking corn.

“Hey, Sharon,” Rich called out. “Look, you’ve contributed new nesting material.” And he pointed to my hair scattered around on the
ground. Now the island was littered with scrub and sand and broken eggshell, bird feathers and bird poop, and long strands of my own hair. “I’m gonna have to write you up,” he told me.

“Fuck you,” I said. I was not very philosophical at that time of my life.

That night I got into my tent all alone and I lay down and zipped myself inside. I felt like such a worm. You’re such an imposter, I thought. You don’t even know how to deal with mites. Then I thought, We’re all imposters. No wonder the birds look at us like that. The boobies’ faces were like kings on coins—so noble, but also so disgruntled. Who do you think you are? they asked us. How dare you? I lay awake in my sleeping bag, all alone, and all around me in the dark I could feel the birds staring with unforgiving beady eyes.

I was so blue. I was claustrophobic with loneliness. My tent was suffocating me. I unzipped myself. I burst out and gulped the air. I struggled out of my sleeping bag, and took some steps. I felt the sand under my toes and I knew the other tents were all around me, but I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t see anything on the island. I looked up and the dark was huge. The sky was so deep and the island such a slip of a thing. The stars showered down; they spackled the whole universe down to the ground, like roman candles flickering to earth. The sight of those stars froze me in my tracks. I watched and watched. Finally, I got so cold I had to turn back. But then I saw a tiny red star near the ground. I came closer to the red speck and I could smell it now—the ember of a pipe.

“Sh!”

It was Brian sitting there smoking.

A wave of relief swept over me. I crouched down next to him. He was warm. He had a jacket.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he said.

“Why’re you always snapping at me?”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are, it’s like you have it in for me.”

“Sharon, I don’t have it in for you.”

“What about when you cut my hair?”

“Somebody had to do it,” Brian said.

“Yeah, so you attack me with the pruning shears—what the hell was that?”

He didn’t say anything. He just sat there smoking. It was too dark to see his face.

“You’re really into power,” I told him.

“Power?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“Yeah—it’s like your little island kingdom here and we’re your minions,” I said.

“Oh, will you please shut up,” he whispered. And then what surprised me—he handed me his pipe.

I breathed in that warm toasty poisonous air and I blew it out again. He let me take a long turn.

“How many people,” Brian said, “get a chance to see this many stars?”

“It’s scary,” I said.

“It’s not scary. It’s”—he was searching for the word—“it’s really really fun.”

“Fun?”
I started coughing. The smoke went down the wrong way. My eyes were watering. “That’s the word you come up with?” Brian thumped me on the back.

“Look at the size of the sky! Look at the majesty! Aren’t you scared sometimes out here?”

“Nope,” he said.

“I just feel like—the universe is so huge and it just dwarfs us. We’re like ants. We’re like dust.”

“So what?”

“You mean you don’t even mind? I mean, here we are, and this island might not even be here a year from now. Here we are right on the edge—it’s like the edge of the world.”

“You know,” he pointed out, “the universe is no bigger here than it is anywhere else.”

“But it
is,”
I said.

“It’s really not.” He got to his feet, and he pulled me up too. “Go to sleep.” With his flashlight he guided me back to the tents.

“You never worry about anything, do you?”

“Not about the size of the universe, I don’t.”

“You think since you’re a scientist it’s beneath you to even think about stuff like that,” I said. “It’s this whole male scientist thing, like you’ve got the world under control.”

“You’ve got it all backwards,” he said. “Scientists observe. The whole point is to watch! The whole point is to stay out of the way.”

“So then where’s the awe?”

“The awe?”

“Where’s your whole sense of the wonder about what’s out here?”

Like an usher in a movie theater he was pointing to my tent with the ray of his flashlight. “Sleep.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going.”

I felt his hand brush my stubby head. He roughed my hair and then he smoothed it in just one caress. And it was the strangest thing how that touch warmed me. It wasn’t as if I’d never been touched before in my life. Twenty-two years old, I’d been touched all sorts of ways. But that one brush of Brian’s hand was so much better.

After that night I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I forgave everybody, even the mites. I just got back into the work we were supposed to do out there, meaning observation of the boobies’ chicks coming out of their shells and stretching out their scrawny necks. Incubation graphs, and census plotting, and these social behavior experiments, where you’d see if the birds would incubate two eggs instead of just one—they wouldn’t. Or whether they’d incubate some foreign object like a can or a rock or even a brick—they would. Or whether they’d go and incubate an egg that we moved outside their nests—about half would and half would not. When you concentrated, all the work was full of joy. The problems of humankind were far away. Everywhere I looked, even in my Norton anthology, the universe belonged to birds. That book was full of bird poetry! For example, William Blake’s poem “Milton.” It was all a bird’s-eye view of the universe. The cosmos was this eggshell; the earth was called “mundane egg.” I’d never understood Blake before, but on Tonic it all made sense. And there were the great bird poems by William Butler Yeats, like “Leda and the Swan” and the one about the falcon “turning and turning” who leaves blood sports behind and just flies up into the sky.

Admittedly, nobody on the expedition took the literary bird connection seriously. One time when I was reading my anthology I said to Imo, “Dig this—there’s a whole poem about an albatross in here!”

Imo raised her eyebrows.

“They killed it!” I burst out after I turned the page.

“I’ve read the poem,” she said.

“Really?”

“I read it in school.”

Then I felt stupid. Imo was practically English, after all. Probably everyone in New Zealand read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
in school. “Oh, we read it in school too,” I told her. There I was all of a sudden defensive about the American school system. “I’m pretty sure we read it in eighth grade, right, Rich?” I called over.

Rich shrugged.

“Help me out,” I said. “Hey, Geoffrey. You read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, right?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I think we did at my school,” I said to Imo. “Maybe I was stoned that day.”

She looked at me like I was some kind of moron.

“Just kidding!” I hated when she stared at me like that. As if she could see inside of me. As if she knew that I was starting to get just a little bit of the wrong idea about Brian. I ducked down and kept on reading.

That night I crept out to smoke with Brian. It was the only way I could talk to him alone.

I confided, “I really want to stay here with the birds forever.”

And he, being Brian, said, “Well, since you have to drink fresh water, that probably wouldn’t be such a great idea.”

And I said, “But don’t you wish you could?”

“No.”

“I’d really rather live on uninhabited islands—”

He put his arm around me there in the dark and leaned in close to me. But all he said was, perfectly logically, “You can’t live on an uninhabited island.”

“I mean, uninhabited by other people!”

He was laughing at me. His beard brushed my face. I felt him hesitate
for just a second. It seemed to me that just that one second lasted about a day; I felt him almost kiss me—and then think better of it. Close to him in the dark, I was holding my breath wishing. But he never did kiss me. He was a terrible flirt that way.

W
HEN
Gaia
came for us I was dragging my feet, I wanted so much to stay. Geoffrey and Rich almost had to pry me away. And I was moody and moony on the boat and hung over the rail with the breeze flapping in my face just looking back at the island until it was a dot, which didn’t take much time since it was less than two miles long. On
Gaia
everyone was jolly, talking about taking showers and peeing indoors and stuff like that, but I got quiet and didn’t talk to anyone. I thought I was too sensitive to speak, too brokenhearted about leaving the birds, and just leaving Nature in general. Then the wind changed and started running from the north.

It was evening when the waves came up. Where they’d been small and choppy they started to whip up higher and slap
Gaia
around. It was getting dark, and the sky cloudy. And then suddenly all the light and glassy blue went out of the ocean and it turned black.
Gaia
pitched up higher and higher on the waves, and every time she reared up, the water below seemed farther down. And she was heavy to begin with, her deck weighted down with all our gear, and all the equipment she tended to freight around in general, other people’s electronics that Abernathy was commissioned to drop off on islands to the south, and camera equipment, and spare parts. It was all piled high, so
Gaia
’s weight in that rough water made her bob and dive like she was in a game of chutes and ladders. Everything was tied on, but she was straining and rolling in the water with all this scientific scrap on her back.