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!”
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
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.
WHEN 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.
At first it seemed like an adventure, sails down, battens locked, all of us cooped below, but the rolling kept getting worse. Gaia started pitching at higher and higher angles; and, while before we’d laughed and gaspe
d like we were on a ride, one huge slam-down ended all that roller-coaster stuff and punched the laughter right out. And our own captain, Abernathy, looked scared, and all of us started cursing. It was like a party getting ugly; you watched it happening, but it wouldn’t stop. Gaia was top-heavy. And we all crouched there, seven of us in life vests, Abernathy and Sean, and Brian and Imo, Geoffrey, Rich, and me. Each of us knew that at this point a wave could knock Gaia so she’d roll over, and then she’d be too heavy in this surf to right herself.
I felt for my silver watch in my pocket, only this time Gaia was the one who was seasick, tossing and retching. We heard her straining in the tempest. She was like an old chair, and it was as if the ocean was one enormous fat person determined to sit on her. She was splintering under the weight. There was no light. All the darkness was howling. The water started coming in and seeping up, and we took turns pumping by hand, because the electric pump was dead. Abernathy and Sean were up on deck. They had ropes tied around their waists, and they were trying to unload the heavy stuff up there, and slip it off. The rest of us were down below and Brian and Imo were pumping, and Rich was swearing and Geoffrey was praying. Everyone was doing his or her thing except for me. I didn’t know what my thing was. I was just holding on to the side of my bunk, trying not to fall.
The boat rose and rose, and then it fell, and water came in on us from all sides. We were wet and shivering and the ocean drove at us. It was strange, but in the troughs, in the ravines and alleyways between the giant waves, there would be these moments of calm, because, ironically when the waves rose up on either side they sheltered us from the wind. In the seconds before the boat got swept up high again there would be still moments where you could hear and see, and you checked yourself and felt your racing heart and how cold you were. I would catch my breath and obvious yet intense ideas would occur to me. Such as: My life was shorter than I thought.
We tossed and whirled. Tilt-A-Whirl, like at carnivals, only higher, only deeper. Down we dove, and each time we swooped down lower. This was drowning. Like an underwater Ferris wheel. We were still wheeling up and around, but soon it would be our turn below. Down, down, down.
Now Geoffrey was pumping, and as he pumped, he was chanting prayers. Another wave and I knocked against him hard, and I heard him repeating like a broken record: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” And I thought, That isn’t right. That’s a land poem; that’s not relevant to oceans. And I wanted to yell and scream, Think of something else, damn it. Except no one would have heard me. The rain was beating down; the wind was so loud. And then that calm moment would come right before we smashed back down; the calm inside the storm—just enough to fall back in your skin again. And I thought, But I’m still young. I thought, I haven’t done anything—besides internships and getting thrown out of school and that one trip cross country, which was a sham; I was just along for the ride; he didn’t love me. I thought, Please, please, please, there’s so much I could do workwise. For the earth, or for women, or for peace. I haven’t even had a chance hardly. Please. If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.
SOMEWHERE in the night the in-between times got a little longer. The waves dropped back, and then calmed down, and quieted. When the light came up over the water, the sky was clearing. We lifted up our heads and looked. The cabin was all wet; our stuff was sopping, but Abernathy had the pump running again. To tell the truth, in the height of the storm he’d saved us by pushing all the oceanographic gear over the side.
On deck the sun came up and warmed and dried us and turned the whole world gold. The water was so calm it was thin, almost transparent. Then almost green. We wrung out our clothes. We opened up the logbooks in the sun to dry. I sat and stared at Grandpa Irving’s lucky watch and I looked around the boat where we were huddled up, and I thought, Here we are with our lives.
4
Find a Pearl
THE noise was a shock. The cars, and the car horns, and the buses, and the pedestrians scurrying around to get out of the way. Honolulu was riddled with people. My ears were ringing; my eyes were tired from looking up and down and everywhere. All those colors and all those trees. What was I still doing here? I kept wondering. Wasn’t I supposed to be lost at sea? I should have been dragged under the boat! Who, at the last minute, reached out and saved me? Nobody. Only good luck. Could that be? I couldn’t sleep, I was so jangled. There I was, safe—yet not sound, way too confused to be sound. At night the streetlights shone through my window from University Avenue. My brain was flooded with that milky imitation night you get in cities.
The worst of it was realizing: if I had died, nobody—except maybe Corinne—would have even cared. If I’d drowned, nobody would have noticed! Especially since my closest friends would have drowned with me. And now, the irony was, having almost drowned together, the whole experience was driving our little group apart. Rich and Geoffrey were back in the department crunching numbers from the trip, and they didn’t want my help, they made that clear. Brian and Imo were not exactly available. They were obsessed with showing the university and their granting agencies they had done nothing wrong. The two of them were sweating it, since it turned out some of the equipment Abernathy had to toss over the side was not officially supposed to be on Gaia in the first place. They swore about three hundred times that they had no idea he’d been overloading Gaia. They’d been completely unaware that he was sailing her unsafely. And I thought, Wow, slandering their own friend and colleague! I even came to Brian and asked him how he could say things like that. And he put his feet on his desk and leaned back in his chair and totally evaded the issue. He looked at me over the tops of his leather sandals and he basically said, “Sharon, this ain’t any of your business.” None of it was my business anymore. Not the boobies, not the research, not the data analysis, not the storm at sea.
The fall semester was starting. Brian was teaching and writing up results with Imo, and no one even thought to ask me to help. I caught Brian in Spaulding where he was picking up his mail. There he was, coming from class, all dressed up, wearing a shirt.
“Sharon.” He stood there by the mailboxes holding his letters.
“I feel like I’ve been dismissed,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because on the islands—I mean, I worked out there and I lived out there—I lived this whole bird study and now it’s like my contribution didn’t even exist.”
“Your contribution did exist,” he said.
“Not if I’m not helping with the paper! Not if I’m not part of the journal article! I thought I was working alongside all of you. I thought I was on the team. And now I’m not even going to get any kind of acknowledgment!”
“Oh, no, we’ll definitely include you in the acknowledgments,” Brian said.
“You mean down at the bottom? In a paragraph at the end? Brian, I was on the team. I want to be an author.”
“An author of the journal article,” Brian said.
“Yes!”
“Sharon,” Brian told me, “you are an unregistered, unfunded, unaffiliated—”
“So what?” I said. “What does that have to do with anything? That’s nomenclature.”
“Sharon, look …”
“What?”
He pulled me out into the hall. “Come on, this whole conversation—”
“What?”
“Sharon, that’s just not how journal articles work. You were an intern, you had a great experience, and you learned a lot over there on the count. But you know that was all that was going on there. And this thing about authorship—full authorship—it’s just not done in our community.”
“What community?”
“The scientific community. The community of Pacific ornithologists. I think if you just sit down and—”
“Brian, I think you’re full of shit,” I said. “And you’re talking about all these protocols and affiliations, but you know that on Ton
ic there was equality, almost the whole time. You know I was working with you. I was living with you guys. Smoking with you. Observing with you. Practically getting drowned with you! That was full participation in the study, okay? That was the reality of the whole trip, and that’s what you’re betraying now.”
Then he just sighed and he looked at me like he was trying to be really patient, and like he was full of regret, since it was his own fault I’d ever stepped aboard Gaia and come along and got into his work, and he said, “Sharon—”
But I turned away.
“Sharon, you don’t need a publication. What you need is to go back to school and turn on your brain and get an education.”
I whirled around. “But that’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what I’ve been doing all this time! What do you think I was doing in French Frigate Shoals? I was working my ass off learning. And I’m asking for some credit for it!”
“Well, it doesn’t work that way,” he said.
WOUNDED and resentful—sure I’d never speak to Brian again—I limped back to my splintery old room at the Y and tucked my head under my wing. I lay there on my bed with the shades down, just trying to process all I’d been through. Just sitting in the shadows, trying to create a little darkroom for my soul.
I had my guitar back from Corinne, and my fingers tried to make music, but they were stiff and out of practice. They still had their positions and their chords inside of them, but they were like old-lady fingers trying to get where they were supposed to go. So I wrote some sad, slow songs about the sea and stars falling down. I put down the lyrics in my notebook, but then I ripped out the pages and crumpled them up. None of the songs was doing what I wanted. I was trying to capture how big the whole universe was around this earth. And how the earth seems so real but is really nothing more than sand in the hourglass, and how hope and love are dashed to pieces in an instant. But I wanted to say all this in new fresh ways; that was the problem.
If I could have afforded it I probably would have nursed my wounds for longer, but I was out of cash again. I didn’t have the heart to work at the university anymore and see all those people from zoology. I couldn’t stand that anymore: academia. I couldn’t stand Honolulu. The place was such a scam. You got there, and you were so excited, and the sky was shining; the beaches were pure white sand; the streets lined with glossy trees. And then it turned out the only thing anyone cared about was rules and regulations. You needed cash and affiliations. If I’d kept my return ticket, I would have been on the next plane. As it was, I couldn’t afford breakfast cereal, let alone a ticket out of there. I remember actually sitting down and writing a letter to my dad.