Don’t come back. Don’t even think of it. He unshipped the oars and rowed out.
It took twenty minutes to reach the edge of the reef. The breakers howled as they pummeled the seaward side. The oars dripped and the little boat wobbled in the foam. A trio of gulls squabbled in mid flight and veered past his head, heading inland.
In alcoves he saw large blue blotches, maybe jellies. An iridescent crab cantered sideways through the shadows, big and hurrying. If anything made noise he could not hear it; the waves disallowed any other sounds—a rising and falling, violent and ceaseless, the abiding element.
The spring after his mother had died, he tried to restart her garden, stepping through the slush on the roof with leftover seeds and pressing them into the potted soil. But for some reason the seedlings, if they appeared at all, came up weak and pale, as if they could tell who planted them, as if grief overwhelmed their roots. Maybe he watered them too much.
Why him, why now? What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade? The air in the box had smelled of nothing, cardboard, old paper.
In the lagoon whirlpools left by his oar blades pulsed with phosphorescence. The dinghy listed uncomfortably. Behind him another comber reared and detonated across the coral. Grace was dead. She had to be. How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.
He reset the oars and stroked toward the reef, across overlapping sheets of foam. It took only three or four strokes—the hull ground over rocks, he pried it free, and then he was into the waves. The first came bowling low over the bulwarks, throwing water past his feet. The next lifted all the way over the bow, and broke over his back. He marveled at the size and strength of them. They were nothing a person on shore or the deck of a freighter could appreciate—you had to be in among them. He fought to keep the oars tracked but it felt as if the blades were caught in cement and they slipped on the tholepins.
His arms were not up to the task anyway. Foamy water rolled through the bottom. In a matter of seconds the boat began to turn. The oar shafts sang under the stress. A third wave exploded against the hull. He could see—for one moment, as the boat plunged into a trough—the ledge of the reef as it fell away beneath him, illuminated by starlight, plummeting into blue darkness. Then the little boat stood up on its stem, and went over.
The oars fell away. He thought: Take me. The dinghy landed upside down with him beneath it. He was dragged across the coral.
An undertow hauled him out and down. The next waves were passing over his head, and he was driven two fathoms deep, the reef shelf looming in bubbles in front of him, and still the tow swept him back, past a slope of sand studded with delicate, waving ferns, past a swarm of tiny phosphorescent shrimp, grazing against the current. They vanished, too, receding as quickly as if a window shade had been pulled, and he was hauled into deep water. The pressure of the sea filled his ears: fierce, grumbling, a thousand tiny cracklings. His eyeglasses were taken from his face. The surface—a roiled sheet of quicksilver—seemed a mile away.
The ocean was so warm it was almost hot, and the feel of the rip and the darkness against him was not unlike the feel of a damp, insistent wind. Urgency traveled through his chest, but despite it a kind of seduction fell over him. How easy it would be to open his mouth and pull water into his lungs.
Above him swells sucked and pulled. Pain squeezed the tips of his jawbone. His ribs began to throb; his epiglottis swung shut over his larynx like a trapdoor.
A body drifting in the sea. A corridor into the light. Suddenly he had all the time in the world to consider things. To the propeller of a passing yacht, to a bird, to the sky, he would be dead, a floating object, little more than a log, a thousand organisms trying his orifices, the world without him precisely as it had always been, or nearly so: waves turning over on the rocks, sun flaring in the eastern sky. Blood would sink in his corpse, gravitating toward the sea floor, purpling his face, his tongue. Plankton would venture into the tunnels of his ears.
For a hydrologist these things were not hard to imagine; they were even acceptable: he would dissolve into the great blue cauldron; his skin into the gastric sacs of sea life; his bones into shells and exoskeletons; his muscles into energy, rifling through a claw, a fin.
Water around him, water inside him. Two hydrogens, one oxygen; after all, it was the ultimate solvent. Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.
Across his eyes passed the fleeting blues and greens of dreams. The stars he had been watching were now like the floodlights of some slow undersea vehicle, toiling the murky bottom. There was time for one fleeting vision: Grace and Sandy at a kitchen table. Sandy passed an orange cereal box and Grace took it with a careful hand. Sandy poured milk into their bowls. A television flickered over their shoulders. That was all he could see, really: a houseplant in the corner, a painting he didn’t recognize above it. Behind them a glass door reflected light from a naked bulb. They were talking but he could not hear what they were saying. Grace was two years old, perhaps. She raised a spoon to her lips.
Saltwater poured into his mouth. He would have given his life a hundred times over to continue peering in at them. Little Grace had curls bunched up against the back of her head. Her pajama top was too small, tight across her belly. She chewed a mouthful of cereal.
But the sea bore him up. His head was at a trough in the swells; he surfaced. A switch threw in his lungs somewhere and he was gasping.
All night he grappled with a luminous doom. The rip had carried him nearly a quarter mile out. A smashed thwart, still nailed to one of the dinghy’s bilge panels, drifted past and he clung to it. Every few moments a star rose over the islands and another disappeared on the opposite side, under the horizon. Was the galaxy turning or was it the Earth?
By morning he had drifted closer and the sea had calmed to a fluid, rolling glass. The island rose and fell on the horizon. Birds traveled the lagoon. Even without his glasses he could identify Mount Pleasant, and the thick cane smoke pluming from the sugar mill. He kicked toward it until his lungs and heart throbbed, then rested, clinging to his float, occasionally letting his face down. In a few hours he was riding a wave through a channel in the coral, his knee striking something hard and sharp at the reef crest, and he was washed onto the packed, ridged sand of the intertidal flat, coughing, paddling forward. When he reached the shallows his legs would not bear him up. He crawled out of the wave break and fell onto the beach. The piece of the dinghy floated up beside him.
The sand was searing hot against his cheek. The pain in his knee was enough to make him faint. A deep, elegant blue rose up along the fringes of his vision.
11
Two dive operators motored his body the mile north to the inn. Nanton helped carry him up from the beach. A doctor dining at the restaurant stitched his knee; a hotel guest donated a plastic vial of painkillers. Soma fetched pillows, gauze, and water; Felix brought beef tea. Even the boys helped, fulfilling Winkler’s obligations around the inn.
But it was Naaliyah’s vigil. She slept on the floor beside him; she waved mosquitoes away from his face; she poured water into his mouth at regular intervals. His eyelids quivered; sweat shone on his forehead; he slept on.
During four days and nights he woke only twice. A thousand splinters of narrative passed in front of his eyes: surface formations in the sand of a shoal; snow blowing through trees; the viscera of an animal steaming in his hands. Were these memories or dreams? He watched a boy sprint down a row of planted saplings; he saw air bubbles cycle through a fish tank. A mantis perched on his thumb, methodically cleaning her face with her forearms.
Eventually he woke. A smell like phosphorus and sulfur, as if a match had been struck, hung in the air. Droplets from the trees plunked onto the shed’s roof. Naaliyah was asleep on the floor, rolled in a sheet. Beside her, beneath the window, waited the box of his returned letters.
He stood and lifted her onto the bed. Then he we
nt out. A half-moon hung over the horizon, its reflection a tapering trail across the water. The lawn was wet beneath his feet and water murmured in unseen streamlets toward the beach.
No lamps in the inn, no sailboats in the lagoon; the lights of St. Vincent six miles away veiled by rain; drops trilling in the understory and the popping and bubbling of saturated ground—for a moment he wondered if a tidal wave had broken over the Grenadines and hauled everyone away. Don’t come back, she had written. You are dead. Maybe he was. Maybe he was dead and this island was a purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?
Grace had died in the flood. Standing beside the inn that evening he was certain of it. His flight had been in vain. There would be no going back.
He returned to the shed, collected the box of letters and a match-book from the sill, and brought them out to the beach. In a hollow near the tide line, he tore up every sheet of paper and set the shreds afire.
The sea churned under the moonlight. Smoke rose into the palms. A breeze caught a burning scrap of paper and sent it flying over the lagoon, glowing at its fringes, then going black and disappearing as it touched the water.
He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.
Book Three
1
Winkler would not leave the Grenadine Islands for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century, a third of a lifetime. The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts. He mended leaks and planted trees and scrubbed coral deposits from the underside of the lobby’s glass floor with a system of magnets. He mowed the lawns, planted young trees, culled dead ones. He washed beach towels. He fixed toilets.
His knee healed beneath a net of scars. An optometrist on St. Vincent ground him a new pair of eyeglasses. He spent $1,100 of the $2,100 E.C. in his plastic box to replace Nanton’s lost dinghy. No one, not Nanton, or Felix, or any of the islanders who knew him, asked what he had been doing that night, why he had tried to take a ten-foot rowboat over the reef. Perhaps the reasons were obvious enough.
He bought a shortwave radio, balanced a series of nerite shells on the windowsill, fashioned a hot plate from a propane tank and an old burner element. Every day he wore a pair of canvas trousers and a T-shirt; his skin browned further; his hair gradually went white. Insomnia slowly carved hollows around his eyes, so that the sockets looked permanently bruised, and the eyes themselves were gradually failing—objects at a distance quivered among halos; small flecks of color began traveling the periphery of his vision. Without glasses he could no longer read a sign thirty feet away.
But these were physical things, remote from him: no more real than if they were the actions and hours of another person. His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble. Out of habit his eyes noticed clouds, signs of cycling weather, rainbows flowing into the Atlantic, and wreaths of moisture around the moon, but the information did not interest him as it once did. It was as if banishment from his nascent family included a banishment from his curiosity as well. Somewhere icebergs were calving off glaciers. Somewhere it was snowing.
St. Vincent won its independence in 1979 and islanders shot Roman candles from rooftops but to Winkler it was just the end of October, Nanton nailing pinwheels to palm trees, Felix drinking an extra fifth of rum. The war in the Falklands was a rumor, a breath, an English couple on vacation sharing coffee.
Gnats whined at his eat. Clouds scaled the mountainsides. Twice in those years Soufrière belched steam and tephra a mile into the sky, and the Caribs on St. Vincent’s northern slopes scurried across the channel to wait it out and some never went back.
Maybe six months after he had nearly drowned, Soma stood in his doorway with a basket of eggs. “For you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She went to the window and stood fingering the shells aligned on his sill. “It was that box? From the post office?”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry I brought it. I wish I had burned it.”
“I needed to know.”
“You are okay now?”
He shrugged.
“You can come by the house, you know,” she said. “You are welcome with us.”
He nodded and rubbed his chin. Her fingers worked the shells, flipping them, rotating them.
“You would like to meet girls?” Felix asked. This was December, or January. Nineteen eighty-one. Or ’82. The kitchen closed for the night, and he appeared in Winkler’s doorway wiping his hands on an apron. “Go to a…what is the word? Rendezvous?”
“Date?”
“Yes, dates. Dates are very fun. I know girls on St. Vincent. And others from church. Even one of the maids, maybe? They might like to go to dates.” He winked.
Winkler sat on his bed. “On dates.”
“Yes. Go on dates.”
“I don’t much feel like it.”
“You’d be okay. They’d like you.”
“It’s all right, Felix.”
“Huh,” said Felix, and took off his watch cap and turned it inside out and pulled it on again. “It is because of your family?”
“I don’t know. I suppose. Something like that.”
“You were asleep. When you held Naaliyah’s ankle? In our house?”
Winkler said nothing.
“It is okay,” Felix said. A shutter at the inn banged in the wind. Someone at the restaurant bar burst into laughter.
“Well,” Felix finally said. “In Patagonia we say: God needs His priests and His ermitaños all the same.”
“His what?”
“His ermitaños. His hermits. Like hermit crabs? Carrying around those shells?”
Later Winkler would wonder: A hermit? Is that what I have become? He thought of Felix, marooned in his own way: the cracked blue house filling with model boats; the way he worked as if he were building little arks that might deliver him across the sea, back to Chile.
When he dreamed it was the now familiar blacknesses, or standard human phobias: he was signed up for a geology course he never attended; he had inexplicably turned in blank pages for his dissertation. He did not dream of Ohio, or Alaska, or Sandy, or Grace. It was as if he had trapped them underwater, beneath a Plexiglas floor, and though he may have stood over them all this time, just a few feet away, he could not look down to see. Eventually they would stop struggling. Eventually they would go away.
Life still contained pleasures: leftovers from Felix’s kitchen, which a waiter would periodically leave steaming on Winkler’s doorstep—pumpkin soup, whelks steamed with garlic, scungilli or snapper, lobster roasted with nutmeg and lime, prawns, ratatouille, roasted christophene, a warm slice of banana bread slathered with butter. There was the reassuring hum of rain on the roof, and the wind in the plants he tended—hibiscus and anthuriums, arrow ginger, oleander, the big symmetrical fans of a traveler’s palm—and there were the thousand colors of sky and ocean, and the clouds that trundled over the island in ceaseless ranks: infinite variations of cumulus, sprawling sheets of stratus, a smear of cirrus troweled against a ceiling of air. In that place the sky was a vast magician’s bowl where miracles brewed up hourly.
And there was Naaliyah. Weeks would pass without his seeing her, but then there she’d be, tapping at his window on a Sunday morning. Each time, seeing her, his heart lifted. She brought him leaves silvered with rain; she broke open urchins on rocks, hunted eels in the shallows, dragged him into the lagoon to rescue a wounded octopus. He helped her build a butterfly net from old T-shirts and wire; he explained to her what he knew about waves, how they revealed the topography of an ocean’s floor, how they told the stories of offshore storms. And he watched her grow up. Her body elongated; she started wearing lipstick, and complaining about the r
estrictions of her mother. Soon she was laughing on the steps of the general store, sipping beer from the cans of older boys; she had school, friends, interests he did not know about. Her tapping at the shutters came less and less frequently.
The boys had dropped out of school one by one and moved to Kingstown to take jobs. They would return for holidays in clean shirts, wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses and speaking in quiet, polite voices, carrying gifts for Soma and Felix: a radio, a Coleman lantern, packets of batteries. By the time she was in secondary school, Naaliyah spent most of her waking hours on St. Vincent. Only once in a rare while would Winkler see her, walking the ferry road in her St. Mary’s uniform (white blouse, navy skirt, high socks), her hair knotted and bunched about her head like a helmet, her blouse dirty, a pile of books clasped against her breasts. “Hi, David,” she would call, and he would stand as straight as he could and smile and continue past as if on critical errands.
She had, Felix told him, removed the posters of soccer players from her brothers’ room and replaced them with photos torn from Chilean magazines: a shanty town, the Torres del Paine, a man in a gas mask carrying a rifle. “She blames her mother for leaving,” Felix said. “She thinks we left too easy. But she does not understand. How there were soldiers, how we were afraid to answer the telephone. How Soma’s friends were taken.”
Naaliyah turned fourteen; she turned fifteen. They sat and watched a hundred birds, small brown sparrows Winkler did not know the names of, land on the roof of the inn and rest along the gutter with their wings half-folded, panting for a minute, before taking off again, one brief reprieve along a three-thousand-mile migration.
Trolling his shortwave at night, Winkler sometimes came across a frequency where a Spanish-speaking girl read seemingly random numbers into a transmitter: 24. 92. 31. 4. 229. Tres, ocho, dieciseis. Her enunciation was painstaking, as though each numeral were a viral, fragile thing. Whenever he found her, tracking along the dial, he would sit and listen until she signed off. Often this could last as long as two hours. Indeed, after a while, he found himself seeking her out, searching the dial for that voice, those mysterious numbers.