The Secrets of a Fire King (19 page)

“Go,” I said. Alone in the clinic, surrounded by the hum of crickets, I held my leg out straight and unwrapped the layers of Jonathan’s shirt. When I got to the wound, a neat dark slash against my shin, blood welled up at once. But not before I had glimpsed it, the flash of white bone beneath the flesh. Bone that had never felt the air.

I pressed the cloth back down, applied pressure. For a long time I just sat. When Gunnar appeared in the doorway, I was weeping.

“Let me see,” he said gently, pulling the cloth away. “It’s deep,” he acknowledged.

I nodded, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand.

122

The Secrets of a Fire King

“It’s cut to the bone. But it’s clean, fortunately. If you could get me the medical kit in the cupboard. And hold my leg while I do this, please.”

Gunnar nodded and came back with the equipment. I fi lled a syringe with novocaine and took a long, deep breath before I injected the drug all around the gash. The numbness spread quickly, and after I’d cleaned the cut the blood subsided to an ooze. Still, when I put the fi rst stitch in, catching my own fl esh with the needle and then pulling the suture through, I felt a wave of nausea and was forced to stop. Gunnar reached up and pressed one palm against my forehead.

“You don’t have to be so brave,” he said. “Lie down, Anna.

All right?”

“But I have to have stitches.”

“I can sew,” he replied. “My grandmother believed it was an essential skill for all human beings, male or female.”

“Well, that’s great,” I said. “I don’t suppose you practiced on human beings?”

Gunnar, wisely, ignored me. “My grandmother is still living,” he said. I felt his fingers, and the pressure of the stitches going in. “She will be a hundred years old next year.” He told me stories of his country as he worked, the long tongues of glaciers reaching down valleys, the fertile rivers and charming cities. The interior of the island so rugged that American astronauts had used it to practice moon landings. Swimming pools filled by geothermal springs, where the snow melted in the rising steam as people swam. Every few months he went back to teach, and to collect data from the Icelandic seas.

“All right,” he said, putting one hand on my shoulder. “Sit up.” The stitches were ugly, rough and uneven, but they were tight and secure. I dressed the wound and stood, testing my weight on my foot.

“Oh,” I said, looking up at the pain, tears in my eyes. I was thinking of Jonathan, the lines in his face, but what I said was

“Poor Phil.”

Gunnar nodded, studying me.

Aristotle’s Lantern

123

“Can you walk, Anna?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

He studied me a moment longer, deciding.

“Good,” he said. “Follow me.”

We walked down an unfamiliar path and arrived at a black sand beach. The sea was rough, but the setting sun had broken from the clouds and everything was vibrant in the sudden light.

There was a shallow cave in the cliff, stairs opening into a passage lit like the aisle of an airplane. Gunnar saw me limping and put his arm around my waist, helping me down the steps.

We emerged into a room underwater. It was built like a greenhouse, with walls of glass. But in the same shape, I saw right away, as the swelling walls of the atrium. We were in the deep water before the drop-off, so that the dome—
a pleasure
dome,
I thought, remembering some long-ago poem—stood as if on the edge of a cliff, fields of coral, the spiny dark sea urchins all around us, and then on the far side of the drop-off, a sudden darkness, the edge of an abyss. Light fell in nets through the water and shimmered across the floor, across my skin, wavered on Gunnar’s face as he turned to me. His eyes were the same blue as the water.

I went to the glass and pressed my hands against it, my face.

My breath gathered and disappeared. A school of parrot fi sh swam by, an inch, no more, away.

“We are about thirty feet below the surface,” Gunnar said.

“The site was very carefully chosen. No coral was destroyed.”

“It’s so beautiful,” I whispered. I felt as if I might cry, I wanted so to feel those fish brush against my hand.

Even as we spoke the light had begun to fade, the sun setting far above.

“It is a research station,” Gunnar said, gesturing toward the drop-off. “We take AUVs out of an antechamber to this room and travel half a mile down to the site. I am talking about a series of hydrothermal vents on the floor of the deep ocean. Near them, we have discovered biological communities—novel, strange communities found nowhere else. And from these communities we are learning extraordinary things about the evolution of life. Unusual
124

The Secrets of a Fire King

symbiosis we had never imagined possible. As a scientist, you must always ask yourself the same question, again and again: Why this form and not another? Why this path and not any other?” In this short time the water around us had grown dark, and fish had begun to emerge, giving off their own pale light. Flashlight fish, shimmering blue-green, and bioluminescent plankton glittering in their wake. Gunnar was no more than a shadow beside me, but his voice, too, was lit with excitement.

“It is not fixed, is what I am saying, Anna. The evolution of life. In these communities we are not studying fossils or shells or the dead artifacts of creation. We are watching life evolve, before our very eyes. You see these fish, giving off their own light? This phenomenon happens very rarely in the world. In freshwater, not at all. In fi reflies, yes, and in some worms, but on earth, almost never. Yet in the deep ocean ninety percent of all animals are luminescent. The chemical process has evolved independently in a dozen different paths. In that same way, these new communities are seeking a different form from anything that now exists. Discovering their potential is the center of our mission here.”

“And the coral reefs?” I asked. “Jonathan’s work on currents, on waves?”

“Also important,” Gunnar said. “But not the center. Anna, do you understand? We are what we are, you and I. Our evolution has followed a particular path to bring us to this moment and no other.

But imagine if another path had been taken, long ago. Imagine if a new evolution naturally occurred, so that an organism such as plankton, say, suddenly contained the chemical properties of fuel.

Or of a perfect protein. Not something engineered by humans.

Something natural, driven by evolutionary necessity. Imagine if these resources were plentiful and cheap, what this would mean.” On the surface far above, plankton glittered like a sweeping of stars. I felt a surge of excitement, power, the thrill of possibility.

“You would change the world,” I said, softly. I thought of the streams of cars back home, exhaust hiding the sun, starving children, struck by drought. “You would save it.”

“Yes,” Gunnar said. “I would. I will. Perhaps it will take decades, but we will do this thing. Without Yukiko, of course, this
Aristotle’s Lantern

125

would not be possible. Pragna knows, a few others here. But I would ask you not to speak of this.”

“Another test?”

“No,” Gunnar said. Medusa jellyfish hovered nearby, their light a translucent green. “This is me, trusting you to see what I am seeing. Sometimes I come here simply for the beauty. To remind myself of what is at the center. Of the mystery.”

“You’re a scientist,” I said, trying to imagine this same passion in Jonathan’s voice when he talked about boundary-layer data. “I didn’t think scientists believed in mystery.” Gunnar laughed. “If there were no mystery, Anna, there would be no science.”

I loved his voice, the way he spoke my name, as if there were waves running through it. We were quiet as we left, walking back through the passage and up the dark stairs. I had been given a gift, I knew this, a gift meant to ease my sorrow. And it had. I never spoke of that place to anyone, and yet I could not stop thinking of it. A rush of the surf and I might close my eyes, imagining the strange light of this other world, hidden beneath the surface of the usual. And sometimes, leaving Jonathan in his restless sleep, I returned to that silent room. I pressed my hands against the glass, plankton scattered high above like stars, fish moving past in their slow orbits, like planets, like strange moons.

People believed it was the shock of watching Phil’s death that had unsettled me, but I knew the source of my restlessness was more complex. Even as the rains abated and our things dried out and people began to return to the islands, I remained alive with secrets, changed by what I’d seen, and the act of not running into Gunnar became as deliberate as running into him would have been. Jonathan was distracted by his failures, and his small habits got on my nerves. The rituals of my life and work, once so satisfying, seemed increasingly empty. More than once I stopped in the center of the clinic, halfway across the room to fetch something I could not remember. More than once I went to the cliff edge and stood gazing out at the water, that high wind in my hair, and the abyss of air just a step away.

126

The Secrets of a Fire King

“This happens to everyone,” Jonathan said one morning, handing me a cup of coffee, but I knew it had not happened to him, not in this way, not for these reasons. “Why don’t you take a vacation, Anna? It’s a bad time for me right now, anyway.” And so I traveled by boat to the mainland, where I boarded a prop plane and then one jet and then another, all the way back to Minneapolis. I had been gone five months, and I felt like a ghost, returning to a home I’d never inhabit again.

In the city, too, I felt this. Litter swirled, and sirens screamed through the streets. The papers were full of things I’d forgotten: murders and racial tension, car accidents and congestion. NPR

did a story on a food shortage developing in Nigeria and the effects of drilling for oil in the frozen arctic sea, and I found myself sitting on the edge of my chair, gripping my coffee cup so hard my knuckles turned white. In this world, I was helpless. I fell asleep at all hours of the day, and dreamed of the waves, rushing one against the other on the shore. I dreamed of falling through the water, or of standing beneath it, my hand held flat against the blueness of that glass.

I had planned to stay for several weeks, but when Jonathan e-mailed that Yukiko Santiago was planning to visit the islands, I changed my mind. It took just two days to clean out our lives in Minneapolis. I didn’t ask Jonathan about any of it—I just wanted it done. A few old pieces of furniture from his family I put into storage, but almost everything else I gave away. When the plane lifted off, I felt, for the first time in my life, completely free.

When I got back, patients were lined up in the waiting room.

I was so busy, and so glad to be back, that for several weeks I hardly thought of Gunnar. I glimpsed him now and then, standing on the boat or walking along the beach. Sometimes he waved across the distance, and I waved back. Pragna had returned from Singapore with the baby, and I saw them too, sitting on the veranda of their chalet or strolling in the park at dawn or dusk. It was a girl, named Analia. After no one, they said, a name they’d invented, a name without the weight of history. I held her once, so small and warm, when Pragna came in for a well-baby check, and sometimes I saw her in the nursery, when Pragna stopped in
Aristotle’s Lantern

127

after work to use the treadmill or the pool. Pragna seemed restless to me, as changed as I felt. One night, walking home late, I saw Gunnar pacing their porch with Analia in his arms. In the distance, behind the sound of the waves, I heard Pragna, faintly weeping.

The days slid by, one into another. The paths hummed with gardeners, painters, carpenters. Jonathan spent long days, and sometimes nights as well, on the other island, overseeing the in-stallation of new drainage and wave-forecasting systems. He took the damage, and Phil’s death, personally, and worried that he might have made equally catastrophic errors in his greater research. Late at night, when he slipped into bed, I’d touch his shoulder and he wouldn’t respond.
Jonathan,
I’d say,
are you all
right?
And he’d sigh and say he was tired, too tired to talk. Often, when I woke in the morning, he was already gone.

Yukiko Santiago arrived on a brilliantly clear day. Diminutive, almost frail, with her hair swept into a severe bun, she wore a blue suit, black high heels, and glasses too large for her face. She walked among us in the park, Gunnar at her side, pausing to greet old friends. When she reached me she held my hand for a moment and said she was glad I had stayed. I was so pleased I could hardly speak. For several days I glimpsed her traveling along paths in a golf cart. I imagined her in secret meetings, or standing in that underwater room.

I did not expect to talk with her again, but on her final day she came to the mainland to observe my clinic. I was nervous during the hydroplane ride, the wind in our hair and salt spray staining her glasses. But in the clinic she was warm, pragmatic, easy to approach. She prepared the plaster for a cast and held the boy’s arm as I applied it. She noted vitals, took throat cultures, and talked through an interpreter to the nursing students. At the end of the day, we sat on the edge of the dock with our legs dangling. Below, the waves moved over the white sand.

“
Ganbatte
, Anna,” Yukiko said. I felt myself flush with pleasure.

“Very well done, indeed.” She looked at me directly, taking me in.

“Anna,” she said, “tell me honestly: is there anything you need?” I thought she meant the clinic and started to tell her about
128

The Secrets of a Fire King

which supplies were running low, but she interrupted me with a wave of one hand.

“Not that,” she said. “You. Are you happy here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.” But to my own surprise I started talking about Jonathan and his worries, the way he couldn’t sleep at night, the growing gulf between us.

Yukiko nodded, staring out over the clear water to where the hydroplane was now visible, a dot on the horizon.