The View From the Seventh Layer

  There were days when Olivia could not ignore the tug of the sun as it crossed the sky. An overpowering dizziness took hold of her as the sun breached the horizon, subsided for a while as it climbed into the heights, and then seized her once again as it began to sink toward the mainland. It seemed to her as if every molecule in her body were tipping very slowly from the east to the west. The sensation reminded her of nothing so much as the feeling she used to get in her legs after she had finished a long day of roller-skating, when her sneakers were back on her feet but she could still feel her muscles swaying to the rhythm of the wheels. She used to love to roller-skate. Every year, beginning in the first grade, she had held her birthday party at the town skating rink—the Great Annual Birthday Bash, she called it. She invited all her friends from both the school and the neighborhood, and her parents reserved the party room for pizza and ice cream, until one day, during her freshman year of high school, Kim Olsen informed her that no one threw Birthday Bashes anymore and she was making a complete and total idiot of herself. Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets. If only she had known when she was growing up how hard the rest of her life was going to be, how diminished, she would have been so much more joyful, so much more daring. She would have done all the things she had failed to do. She would have hiked across Europe. She would have gone skating every day.

  She had moved away from the Midwest at nineteen to go to college, and, after the suspicions came out and her parents divorced, there had been little reason for her to return. Her dad bought his beach house on the island, her mom left for San Diego and Boston and finally Brazil, and Olivia drifted around like a bottle tossed carelessly into the water until she ended up here at the garden cottage, where she could hear the ocean crashing even through the walls. Nothing was secure from one minute to the next. She did not remember her dreams when she woke in the morning. A wild rooster had made its nest in the palmetto barrens across the street. The only one of her classmates she had so much as laid eyes on since high school was Chad Hayden, the captain of the varsity soccer team, who had come to the island a few years ago on his honeymoon and stopped at her map stand to buy a package of condoms and a Milky Way bar. Though she used to trade notes with him almost every day in Mr. Picard's chemistry class, he had failed to recognize the girl she used to be in the face of the woman in the clean blue T-shirt offering him $1.50 in change and a package of Trojan Ultra Thins. She had been too embarrassed to say to him, “I'm Olivia, don't you remember? From East High? The one with the bangs?” Later that night, as she watched her dinner revolving in the microwave, it occurred to her that somewhere on the island he and his bride were moving against each other in the dark, making love with a condom that had passed through her fingers. She had read somewhere that the best way to reset your circadian clock was to illuminate the backs of your knees, and so every night, after she took her sleeping pills, she was careful to shield the lower half of her body from the light.

  Her father once told her that the clapboards of her house were salvaged from an allotment of hardwood barrels. One of the island's earliest successful businesses was the Holt and Liverett Cooperage, he said, which specialized in making barrels to carry whole grains and seed corn. When the cooperage went bankrupt, the wood was sold off to the highest bidder. Many of the staves had already been bound together with metal hoops, which explained why some of the boards in her wall slewed outward when it rained. “You don't even know where you're living, do you?” her father asked her. “You need to wake up and open your eyes, baby girl.” Olivia had read a story once about a house that was assembled from the boards of an old race track. She remembered that the man who lived there could hear hundreds of cars speeding by, one after the other, whenever he put his ear to the wall.

  There was a time in her life—and not so long ago—when she read nearly every day. Back then her favorite books had been Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, and everything by Jane Austen except Northanger Abbey. Then something went wrong, and she was no longer able to concentrate on the novels she brought home with her. Everything about them seemed imaginary, insubstantial, built on a tissue of fog and lies—and not just the settings and the characters, either, but the very words on the page. They might have been invented just that second by somebody who had never so much as set foot in the world. “This is a story about love and death in the golden land.” “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.” “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” What did it all mean? This was the truth: she could no longer hold a book in her hands without tasting the paper in the back of her throat and smelling the ink on her fingers. The whole experience made her feel unclean. And though she was better now than she had been in the beginning, she rarely picked up more than the occasional glossy magazine. She had lost the habit of reading for pleasure. She knew that this celebrity was dating that one, and that a third celebrity was divorcing a fourth one, and that a fifth celebrity was filming a movie in Nepal, and she did not like it.

  The first few weeks of spring, when the butterflies arrived on the beach as if from another planet, had always been her favorite time of year on the island. The butterflies were the pale yellow color of primrose blossoms. They liked to rest on top of her map stand, exposing their wings to the sun. At certain times of the day she could see their shadows opening and closing on the underside of the awning—a phenomenon of nature. She had heard that you could balance a raw egg on its end during the spring equinox. She had heard, too, that tornadoes would not form along the equator because of the Coriolis effect. She could not remember which story was supposed to be true and which was supposed to be a myth. The widow Lorenzen had never asked her to kill one of the yellow butterflies, but she said that she considered them pests just the same. She liked to follow Olivia through her house as Olivia stalked the various beetles and wasps she had found. The widow ate prepackaged chocolate-and-cream rolls she called Debbie cakes. Her face was always crimped with outrage over the insects. She never understood why Olivia would not kill them. “Why don't you just obliterate the damned things?” she asked. The portrait of her husband that hung in the parlor looked like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Olivia guided each and every one of the insects carefully toward the villa's front door, closing cabinets and window shades as she passed from room to room to seal off the various pathways of the labyrinth. Often the bees and wasps made a creaky warning noise with their wings and then plunged as if to sting her. But they were frightened and disoriented, and she did not see how she could blame them. She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world. It was one of the many things she had learned when the Entity took her into the sky and burned her with the soft touch of its fingers. It gave her water in a smooth silver cup, and it spoke to her without moving its lips, and the gentleness in its eyes nearly blew her heart out.

  She still thought about Chad Hayden sometimes, though of all the people she had known before she grew out of her ease with the world, he was one of the least important to her. She wondered where he lived now, if he had any children, whether he worked in an office. She sat in the rattan chair on her little square porch and watched the palm leaves shivering in the wind. One time, when she was eight or nine, she threw a rock at her father while he was watering the lawn, and he sprayed her with the garden hose. Another time, on the last day of her senior year of high school, following an impulse she only barely understood, she wrote in Brian Plimpton's yearbook, For what it's worth, I had a crush on you for most of the last three years, but I was too afraid to do anything about it. She found the gesture so liberating that she decided to tell some tiny part of the truth in every yearbook she signed that day. In Chad Hayden's she wrote: I will never forget the time th
e two of us hung the homecoming banner in the cafeteria and you lifted me straight up into the air by my ankles. In Deborah Straw's she wrote: I had a dream once that I was you, looking at me, and I said to myself, “I like Olivia, but I'm sure glad I'm not her.” In Kim Olsen's she wrote: You were my best friend for so long that it slips my mind sometimes that you're not anymore. It was the bravest thing she had ever done in her small, shy, carefully studied life.

  ________

  Some of the maps Olivia sold were simple municipal street maps. Some were tourist maps, highlighting various houses and landmarks of historic and cultural significance to the area: the sculpture garden, the old town hall, the eyebrow house where the notable painter used to live. There were topographical maps and hiking maps and commercial maps emblazoned with the emblems of all the shops and restaurants on the island. If Olivia were to dive off the edge of any of the maps and travel southeast—through the sea, over the mountains, and into the jungle—she would eventually pass very close to her mother's house in São Paulo, Brazil. Once, when she called the house, her mother's husband Graciliano answered the phone and told her, “Your mother and I will be—how do you say?—pleasing each other this afternoon. Perhaps she will call you tomorrow?” Olivia had met Graciliano exactly three times, first at his wedding to her mother, then on vacation in New York City, and then at a short overlapping layover the two of them shared at the St. Louis International Airport. He had worn the same pair of shoes each time, a rich black leather with a needle-prick design like a spreading sunset on the toes. His shoes were objects of beauty. Olivia did not have a car, and when she was feeling healthy, she took a different route home from the marina at night. She liked the slapping sound her sandals made on the pavement. She knew the island well, but not as well as her father. She would never know anything as well as her father. The eyebrow house was called an eyebrow house because of the way the roof mantled the windows on the second floor, he told her when she finally asked, and not, as Olivia had thought, because of the eyebrows of the painter who used to live there, however thick and bearlike they might have been.

  She worked as a maid for a house cleaning service one year. This was when she first arrived on the island, before her father bought the map stand, when she was young and wandering and still remembered her dreams when she woke in the morning. The cleaning service called the houses on their roster “dwellings.” Olivia was expected to clean three large dwellings or five small dwellings a day. After she had finished the floors and the carpets, she would always take a break, drifting through the rooms like a specter. The heart of every house was the kitchen, the soul of every house was the bedroom, and the mind of every house was displayed with hooks and thumbtacks on the walls. But the conscience of every house—she believed—the conscience of every house was the bookshelves. She was demoralized by the number of houses whose shelves held only clocks and geodes and a few back issues of TV Guide. She imagined the consciences of the people who lived there hardening into a thousand immovable facets as they sat in their armchairs and watched the minutes roll by. And many of the shelves that did contain books carried only a few tattered romance novels or an oversize hardcover tribute to some summer blockbuster or television series. It was the rarest of houses that was actually equipped with books she would have been excited to read. She knew that it was priggish, but she came to rash conclusions about the people whose collections she perused. She couldn't help herself. People who read Maeve Binchy give their sympathy so indiscriminately that she wondered whether it might not be self-pity simply masquerading as sympathy. People who read Charles Bukowski believe that the only clear vision is a disfiguring one. Olivia used Windex on the windows and Scrubbing Bubbles on the bathtubs. She used Febreze on the carpets. People who read Thomas Pynchon are smart but disdainful. People who read D. H. Lawrence suspect that the forbidden is not necessarily without its virtue, and so are easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous are one and the same. She stood on a stepladder to wipe the dust off the blades of the ceiling fans. She took extra care emptying the husks of insects from the light fixtures. The vacuum cleaner moaned and howled like something that was wounded, but she could hear the ocean again as soon as the motor died away.

  Later, when she had stopped reading altogether, she filled her spare time listening to the radio and making pots of tea for herself. She captured insects for the widow Lorenzen. She allowed her mind to wander as she waited for the light to change. As soon as the sky went dark, she felt a tremendous loosening inside her body, as though some terrible knot had been teased apart and now all the threads that held her together were finally running straight again. She had no responsibilities once the sun set. Or rather she had only one responsibility—the responsibility to fall asleep—and for that she could use her tablets. A few nights a year, the island's main generator went out. The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail points. In Andrew Brady's yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film strip in Miss Applebome's class, and the lights were out, and you sat behind me scratching my back with your fingers. Olivia had heard somewhere that the hour from midnight to one o'clock was called the witching hour because that was when the witches were supposed to be active, but she had heard somewhere else that the witching hour was simply that hour of the day when everything always went wrong. It was yet another instance when she could not remember which story was supposed to be true and which was supposed to be a myth. If the witching hour was the hour of hardship, the hour of lucklessness, then she had experienced witching hours that lasted for days on end, but if the witching hour began at midnight, then she usually slept right through it. Every night after she took her pill, she would watch TV for half an hour and then lie in bed staring at the wall of books that lined her cottage. She believed that her books were like the abandoned shell of a hermit crab—a historical record of the conscience of her house, rather than an actual living conscience.

  There was a Greek restaurant at the western edge of the marina where she liked to eat lunch. The restaurant served falafel platters, gyros, and glasses of Dr Pepper with wedges of lemon suspended inside them like tiny moons. Its rooftop dining area had a row of pay telescopes that were pointed toward the ocean. Patrons could purchase a minute of viewing time for a quarter, and each day at noon, when the crowd was at its thickest, a row of children stood there feeding quarters into the slots as though they were playing video games. The children, both boys and girls, wore baseball caps with pictures of Japanese cartoon characters on them. They had freckles and missing teeth. Olivia enjoyed looking through the telescopes herself, but only when the weather was right—bright and blue, with a few compact clouds riding the wind. The waiters at the restaurant knew her by sight, but not by name. “Miss?” they would say. “Oh, Miss? Why don't you step away from the machine for a while and give some of our smaller customers a turn?” Far out on the ocean, where the waves were slow and heavy, she could see the shadows of the clouds moving across the surface of the water. Once, a tourist who had just returned from an aquatic sightseeing trip told her that there were schools of fish that followed the shadows like newborn babies trying to keep their mother in reach. He said that the fish were the color of Dijon mustard. Olivia was more interested in the clouds than she was in the water, and she was more interested in the shadows than she was in the clouds. She did not know when she had become so unlike other people.

  She took her pill every night at ten thirty. The television was in her bedroom, and she knew it was time to switch it off and slide beneath the covers when her vision began to blur—or not blur exactly, since no matter what happened, her eyesight remained sharp, but separate, splitting into two distinct images, one that stayed in place and a second that s
eemed to drift up and to the left without ever actually moving. There were times when she slept so heavily that she barely heard her alarm when it sounded in the morning. It was two hundred years ago, and she was living in a cabin on the frontier, and though she could see the fires smoking off in the distance, she knew that it would be days before the Indians were able to cross the prairie. Her trouble with the sun began not long after she started taking the pills. She could not help but wonder if there was a connection. Warning: Side effects may include dry mouth, drowsiness, and an inability to tolerate the basic conditions of life on the planet. One morning she woke up to find her father sitting on the edge of her mattress. Her sheets were awry, and his hand was resting on her leg. People who read Anne Rice believe that tragedy is romantic. People who read Salman Rushdie use their scruples like a blade: the humane ones use them for opening, the cruel ones use them for wounding. Her father had her copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses open in his free hand. He said to her, “Did you know that Cupid was the Roman god of love and the Roman god of revulsion? Here, listen: ‘From his quiver, full of light, he drew two darts, with different properties. The one puts love to flight, the other kindles it. That which kindles love is golden and shining, sharp-tipped; but that which puts it to flight is blunt, its shaft tipped with lead.’ ” Then he put the book down on her nightstand, and outside, in the garden, a hundred birds stopped singing and took to their wings as the widow Lorenzen's old Cadillac backfired.