It had taken him a dozen drafts. Soma was asleep and he laid it in her lap to make copies and mail in the morning. “I hope they will accept it handwritten,” he said aloud, into the shadows. It was the first letter he’d been able to finish in twenty years.
7
Now, in the last hours, he noticed patterns everywhere: a template in the glistening trail left by a slug in the bottom of the sink; another in the veins of a leaf, blown across the sill; yet another in the arrangement of condensation droplets on the toilet tank. He stared at them for minutes, convinced there were answers locked there, correlations, a code he couldn’t quite break.
Soma came in the door late—she had missed yesterday altogether. Did she even believe him about his dream? In a borrowed fry pan she cooked a dozen eggs over a foam of butter and they sat watching the dark windows across the way and passing the pan back and forth, eating with their fingers. As if across the street an engrossing film played. But there was only the wind against the sheets in Naaliyah’s windows and the isometric reflections of the street lamps.
“You can’t keep her from what she wants, David. Even if it means letting her reach a destiny you fear. You have to leave that up to God. If you push at her, she’ll just push back harder.”
He closed his eyes; he thought he could hear, although he did not have his radio on, the girl on the shortwave whispering outside the window: 13, 91, 7…
Soma laid a sheet across him, pulled it up to his neck. He shook himself awake. But he could not fight it; his eyelids felt. There was a noise, grains of sand grinding beneath a chair leg. Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?
The shadows in the corners of the room pooled toward the center, and at some point the floor of the apartment had become the floor of Nanton’s lobby, a window into some greater darkness, the seams giving way, a black, eager liquid rushing the gaps.
In a nightmare Naaliyah dragged chains onto a beach and shook still-living fish from her hair. “These things happen,” she said, “not because you foresee them but because you foretell them. The telling makes it so.” She grabbed his shirt and pushed him down. Then Naaliyah was turning into Sandy, and Sandy into Herman, and the beach was a rainy driveway beneath his back, and Herman had hockey pads strapped to his legs, and skates on his feet. He kicked Winkler; he braced the blade of a skate over Winkler’s throat. Numbers dropped from the clouds like leaden kites, huge and spinning.
Winkler moaned in his chair. Soma crept down the iron stairs, made her way to the waterfront, caught the last ferry home. Naaliyah’s boyfriend, Chici, came across the road in the final darkness before dawn and set a plate of chicken, wrapped in plastic, by the stairs to Winkler’s apartment.
8
In the end he did not need chain cutters or snorkeling fins. She exited her building in the predawn on Sunday morning and he hurried down the iron staircase, as usual, to follow her A fog clung to the buildings and the street lamps hummed. They were the only two people about. He had the sense she knew he was there, a hundred yards behind. She moved up Halifax Street, walking quickly, the cuffs of her sweatshirt pulled over her hands, the shops dark, the kiosks padlocked, the second-story windows shuttered as if a hurricane had been forecasted, or some worse scene not even buildings could bear to watch.
At the pier she descended the ladder into her launch, unlocked the Evinrude, topped off the tank, and motored out, heading north, keeping the shoreline to her right. He began to run, glimpsing her through the fog and gaps between houses. She gained on him, of course, disappearing around one point, then another. But he ran on, leaving the road when it ended, and crashing through scrub. The hillside shanties petered out; soon there was only a thin trail, and the jumbled prop roots of screw pines, and the sound of her engine, far ahead of him.
Brush lashed his legs. Spiderwebs wrapped and clung to his face. Twice he stopped and walked, clutching a stitch beneath his ribs.
Maybe a mile from town, she killed the motor in a sapphire-blue cove, probably a hundred meters from shore. The trail climbed and he glimpsed her from a low knoll and then kept on. By the time he caught up she had been there a couple of minutes and was already drifting, leaning over the stern, peering into the water. He stood huffing on a rocky beach, beneath a stand of palms. The muscles in his legs felt unraveled and overstretched; the sound in his ears was of blood.
Naaliyah reached beneath a thwart and produced what looked to Winkler like a diving mask. She strapped it over her head. The air was alive with salt and wind; a pair of fat, golden gulls glided past him and landed placidly in the water.
Then everything was familiar: an imprecision to the shadows, a smell in the fog like decomposing leaves, the sound of palms rasping behind him. Her back was to him; the launch wobbled beneath her movement. The dream broke over him like a wave.
He took off his glasses and set them in the sand. He thought: Here it is again. Naaliyah stooped over something in the stern. Then, impossibly, since he had sunk it five nights prior, she was raising what looked like a cinder block. Before she had dropped it over the transom he was pulling off his shoes and socks, charging forward.
Sharp rocks; a spread of corrugated sand in the shallows; clear, warm water breaking at his thighs; a last glimpse of Naaliyah clinging to the stern. He dove. His arms swept forward, one then the other, and a thought emerged: I should have practiced. She was too far away. His legs kicked, his arms rotated. Almost immediately he was exhausted. The muscles in his neck and upper arms stiffened and threatened to lock.
He forced his shoulders to roll forward. The pain built to a point where he felt his arms melt into a kind of mist and he became, for a moment, limbless, a stone sinking toward the bottom. By now she would be trapped a fathom down and working against the bight of chain around her ankle. The empty skiff would make slow pivots around its stern.
The water was almost impossibly clear. Even without his glasses he could see the sea floor recede slowly away from him, pastel poufs of coral and blizzards of tiny fish and one lone grouper hunkered among the shadows, slowly fanning its pectoral fins.
He breathed, marked his bearing, and forced himself to keep on. The sea buzzed and cracked in his ears, matching the sound of his blood. One arm. Then the other. He found himself thinking of water, how it is never still, how even in our bodies water never relents: ceaselessly vibrating, each electron in each molecule in each cell orbiting, spinning, nine independent vectors of position and force, a rapture of movement.
His arms became dowels in a vat of honey; his heart inflated until it pressed against the backs of his ribs.
Then, quite suddenly, she appeared ahead of him in the water, a few streaks of sunlight angling past her. She looked as he knew she would, hanging upside down and bent at the waist, scrabbling at the chain, which had looped twice around her ankle and pulled taut, extending in a thin vertical column toward the sea floor. Bubbles rose from her mouth and hair. The chain quivered sluggishly.
His heart pushed through gaps in his chest. The noise in his ears built to a crescendo. Her body slackened, unfolded; her arms swung beneath her. He dove and tried to raise the chain but the cinder block was heavy on the bottom and the chain was fast to her ankle.
He ascended, breathed, and dove again. This time he went below her and hauled on the chain until he had a few seconds of slack as the cinder block rose, and with a final spasm of energy, he loosened the coil enough to free her ankle. She floated up. He watched her head break the surface and grasped the chain a half second longer, little stars bursting across his vision, blazes of light swaying and shifting on the roof of the water.
He surfaced. Her eyes were open but not blinking and her breath would not start. “No,” he heard himself saying. “No no. No no no,” denying not only this moment but every preceding one, all the houses and bridges of time, his thrashing heart, his exploding lungs: George DelPrete, Sandy, Grace—he would den
y himself, deny structure, dissolve into the ocean, spin in a tiny, dissociated cloud somewhere in the depths.
A moment passed: silence, just water lapping at their necks and the boat turning calmly against its anchor. A sheet of gold mist lay quivering all around them. Water ran down her face and into the corners of her mouth. A feeling like waking from a dream came over him; the dream melting away, a sharper, more coherent reality dawning. Sandy’s voice reverberated in his memory: “I hate this part. When the lights come on after a movie.”
He fit his hands beneath her rib cage and squeezed. The tide was coming up. With each breath the bottom of the sea, maybe a dozen feet below, sank imperceptibly away. The raging of his heart subsided. Passing swells, low and warm, pushed past them and moved on. Strands of Naaliyah’s hair floated into his mouth. “Wake up,” he said, and embraced her as firmly as he could. “Wake up.”
Mucus leaked from her nostrils. He turned her, and with his arms locked around her waist, pressed his lips against hers and blew into her mouth. He inhaled, readjusted his grip, breathed into her again. Her body accepted the air; he could feel her lungs swell against it, her body float a fraction higher in the water.
He thought of Felix and Soma, just now waking. Was this the conclusion of his dream after all? Two refugee parents, lying on their sad, crumpled mattress, while their daughter drowned six miles away?
How easy it is to let water take you. Warm and smooth—it is like surrendering to the bluest sleep. Don’t all of us, at our ends, whether we die in a desert or a quiet white room, drown in some way?
He inhaled once more; he breathed into her. Her eyelids fluttered. She coughed and spewed mist. He compressed her midsection and she inhaled a ragged breath. “Thank you,” he said. “Oh thank you.” At the horizon stratocumulus clouds gathered in silent, big-shouldered stacks.
9
Thunder, a sound like furniture being dragged across the sky. He hauled himself up from his sheet on the floor, put on his glasses, and went to the window. Lightning ran on in the twilight, flaring mostly in the clouds, but a few fingers dropped now and then to touch the hillsides above town. The power to the street lamps had been knocked out and in the blue, vaporous light he could just see the tossing crowns of palms and the rearing black arcs of utility wires. Lightning strobed close by and Naaliyah’s building stood small and bright for a moment, its windows and decaying facade, before it was sucked back into shadow.
Wind threw sand and leaves and plastic bags down the street. He unlatched the window and let the first raindrops blow over the sill. In his imagination he could hear trees on the hills stretching to catch the water, roots perking, trunks leaning, leaves reaching out. Up the street a shutter pushed open and someone cranked in her clothesline. A few people—little more than shadows—stepped from doorways and held up their palms, gaping at the sky. After a minute or two the tile around his feet was wet, and he drew the shutters.
In the hospital the whole family had showed up, Felix and Soma and the three boys, and the doctor said Naaliyah was fine, no lung or chest complications, just sore ribs, just shock. She was discharged that night. Nobody asked him how he had been there. Felix shook his hand. Soma hugged him a long time. His clothes left wet marks on her dress.
Now the wind stilled and the rain came harder and he retreated inside and listened to it thrum on the roof and let sleep come over him.
The following afternoon Soma walked with him down Back Street and together they stood at the quay beside a vast produce warehouse watching the rumbling queue of farmers’ trucks and the athletic pivots of loaders as they passed crates of bananas down a human chain. Behind them, in the market, a nutmeg merchant collapsed his umbrella and shook its water into the runnels.
“What now?” Soma said.
He glanced at her face, the wide, planarian-shaped nose, the light brown cheeks, the skin freckled lightly over her cheekbones. Nanton had cleaned out the shed at the inn and was now storing the riding mower there. The new groundskeeper, Felix said, was a teenager from Kingstown who brought friends in there to smoke marijuana.
“I’ve been thinking about work,” Winkler said. Out in the harbor a few unrigged sailboats bobbed at their moorings, and halyards chimed against their metal masts, a sound like church bells. “Not for Nanton, but here on St. Vincent.”
Soma turned to him and let her arm rest on his shoulder. He pivoted slightly, and was embraced, the warm column of her body, the thin cotton of her dress, the sweet, living smell of her neck.
For a desk he unhinged the bathroom door and laid it across two waxy boxes used for shipping beef. The first days it was a notebook and pencil, but soon it was out in the streets, on the switchbacked paths above the town, even as far north as the slopes of Soufrière. He started with descriprions of water, or sketches; he’d crouch over a rivulet running from the forest into the sea: the braided channels, driving miniature landslides of sand before them—the way the surface of the water flashed and stretched in the wind, the way it poured on, seemingly endless.
In the afternoons he walked to Kingstown’s only library, an antique two-story gingerbread with books stacked on every available piece of furniture and trade winds stirring everything on the second floor so that, after particularly strong gusts, the place fluttered wildly with papers.
There were so many things he had not known: researchers with remote-controlled submersibles had found sea life two miles deep, beside volcanic vents called black smokers—and not just microbes, either, but meter-long worms, clams as big as hubcaps. There were new phenomena, thousands of them: global climate change, reservoir pollution, rising sea levels. Physicists theorized that a trillion subatomic particles called neutrinos passed through a person’s body every second—through a body, its bones, the nuclei of its cells, and out again, into the ground, into the core of the earth, out the other side, and back on into space. There were older notions, too: FitzRoy, captain of Darwin’s Beagle, pored through fossil beds of mollusks determined to find evidence for Noah’s global flood. An Englishman named Conway argued that sparrows left farm ponds in autumn not for warmer climates, but for the moon.
Were they so wrong? Who was to say their guesses were any less applicable than the theories of scientists who strapped radio collars onto geese? They were all aspirations toward the same unknowable truths.
Gates were creaking open inside him—paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more. He would write a book. He would write a treatise on water, a natural history of it: it would be new and popular and fascinating; it would be the Double Helix of water. He would start small, with the attraction between hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This would in turn illuminate everything else, glaciers and ocean and clouds—what had he been doing for so long at Nanton’s inn?
He filled one notebook, started another. Every day he could feet whole segments of himself waking. The sight of the sea just after dawn was enough to make him stand and watch for an hour. Boobies chased one another across the reef line; light touched the tops of the swells; shadows shrunk in the troughs. He lay on his back in a buzzing, abandoned cane field and watched cumulus bloom, growing across seventy miles of sky, a movement so slow you could hardly observe it, a gargantuan puffing, a heart-pulling tumescence. He ate dinner at Soma and Felix’s; he shared a cigarette with Naaliyah’s dreadlocked boyfriend. He saw Naaliyah herself only occasionally, running up the stairs to her apartment, or running down, toting a sheaf of papers, a bag of groceries, but to see her brought a quickening to his pulse, and he found he could not keep himself from smiling.
In the evenings he’d sit in the alley with the butcher, a small, very black-skinned man with shiny forearms and improbably delicate hands. He smoked and rebladed his saws and told Winkler stories about the 1902 eruption of Soufrière that killed 1,600 islanders, or how his grandfather would kill pigs with a ball-peen hammer. “One whack,” he said. “Back of the neck. Over and over. All day, every Friday.” He pronounced “Friday” like “Frey-dee.”
&n
bsp; Winkler would wake at midnight with his mind active, revving high, and scribble sentences into his notebook: Do starfish grow old? Or: Water, impossibly, is in the sun—a wreath of steam, unfathomably hot, floats around the corona.
In June, Naaliyah appeared on the iron stairwell outside his door. She was wearing a rubber raincoat and her legs were like tan sticks between the hem and the tops of her boots. Mist rolled on the landing behind her. She smiled. “Got an hour?”
She led him to the institute and they stood a moment on the pier looking down at the launches bobbing and clattering lightly in the dark. She chose a larger boat, stacked as usual with wire traps in the bow. A winch stood on scaffolding over the stern. The anchor, he noticed, was brand-new, an aluminum trefoil with symmetrical flukes, set into the bow.
Wordlessly, she lowered the motor and steered them clear of the last pilings. He could not help the fear from starting: something would capsize them and she would be trapped again in the chain and drowned. But he had dreamed nothing and the day felt new and unportentous. All around them the sea glided past black and glassy. Moisture in the air condensed on his forehead and hands.
She found a gap in the coral benches that headed the harbor and maneuvered north. They passed beaches Winkler knew, the island sliding past dark and silent beneath the noise of the motor, to a place he had never seen, where the shoreline was rocky and beachless, crenellated cliffs beneath an unbroken forest. The water here was pocked with buoys. She eased the throttle and let them drift.
“Eels,” she said, as she clambered to the stern and reached for a green buoy with a long gaff. “For one of the professors.” She caught the buoy line in the gaff hook, pulled the launch closer, and snapped an eyelet at the end of the tine through a carabiner on the winch. The unclipped buoy she tossed into the bow. Then she threw a switch, the drum turned, and the line began to coil. “He’s studying some photochemical in them. He thinks it might help in human neurology. Something like that.”