Island

by Patrick Downes

  “Wow, Jac. Don’t remind me.”

  “No. I mean it was artificial, weak from the beginning, and it fell down.”

  “But you wanted that bridge.”

  Jacqui shook her head. “You’re really going to make me work for this.”

  “What does that mean?” I felt myself clenching my teeth. My heart caught fire. “I just don’t understand. You chose someone else before me.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.” Jacqui took a deep breath. “Everybody thinks they want the easy bridge, the bridge that lasts just long enough and then falls. But, Rad — the bridge between us is a land bridge. It’s under the water and not too deep. You can almost see it through the waves. We’ve always had it. We’re already bridged.”

  Jacqui leaned into me.

  We kissed.

  We kissed, and for a moment I felt like I was becoming an island, a high island, a true island made of lava. An undersea volcano gave me up to the ocean and waves, and I broke through to the air. I was hotter than I’d ever been, and cool. Steam and rock. Molten and solid.

  We kissed, and I was Atlantis, the island city lost to water, submerged, and then raised up from the bottom of the ocean to the surface by some Titan.

  Jacqui and I, kissing, became an island in the street, and the people had to pass around us, break for us, like waves.

  The tides fell away. Or we were raised up high enough to see the land that connected us. We were joined, and we went back and forth to each other.

  I was more an island than ever before — and less.

  * * *

  ı

  But it couldn’t last. The ocean rose, and our bridge drowned.

  I’m talking about the ocean in me. The ocean of fear and sadness and daydreams and whatever else. The dark ocean I had known since before my mother died.

  I had no idea what to do with Jacqui.

  “You have no idea what to do with me,” Jacqui said this morning.

  “That’s not exactly true,” I said. “I like looking at you.”

  “I know you do.”

  “I like touching you, too.” Jacqui still had her luminous skin, but —

  Imagine touching something you’re not entirely sure you are touching. I mean, you can feel something solid under your hand, but you can’t detect anything on the surface to prove you’re not only stroking air. I think some fur is like this. Chinchilla, maybe. When I touch Jacqui — touched, past tense — I sometimes felt I wasn’t touching a person, touching skin, touching anything at all. Except Jacqui is a real, human girl. Strange, really, to love a girl who’s almost an illusion of a girl.

  “Touching you might sometimes be better than looking at you,” I said.

  “Not exactly grounds for a relationship,” Jacqui said.

  “I’m better at talking now than I ever was,” I said. “Remember when I could barely talk at all?”

  “Yes, but —”

  “You’re not happy. I hate that you’re not happy.”

  “Who’s happy, Rad? Really, who’s ever happy?”

  “Shouldn’t you be happy? You have everything.”

  “Do I? I’ll go to college, and I have plenty of money, but modeling’s finally gotten too stupid and unbelievably stressful. You really have no idea. You never have. Except that you wonder if I’ll come home from wherever I have to go. You wonder who I’m with, what I’m doing, and it eats you up. I love you, and you have no way of holding on to that. You can barely talk to me, since you can’t sort through your feelings and ideas long enough to make sense of what you want. You’ll escape high school, and then what? You won’t code or surrender to what you can do, so? And I can’t complain about anything without you getting all nuts on me. I just want you to listen, but you can’t stand it when I’m — I don’t know.”

  “Unhappy. My mother was unhappy.”

  But Jacqui had stopped listening.

  “My brother, Harrison, dropped off the face of the earth, sort of. He never calls, texts, nothing, and he never comes home. He abandoned me, my parents, not just Key. Key can’t look me in the eye. He can’t talk to me. The two of you. And —”

  “Tolstoy.”

  Jacqui stared at me. Her bluebrownblack eyes wild. “Tolstoy?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Coward.”

  That word.

  “Just like your father. He gave up his wife and kids but couldn’t find anything else to do. Your mother died, and —”

  Why did she have to mention my mother? The fire in my heart.

  “I’m not a coward.” How could I tell Jacqui the only thing that made sense was to be by myself or spend the rest of my life with her, trying to make her happy? I wanted to give myself to an island far away from everyone and everything, or live on the island Jacqui and I would make for ourselves. “I’m seventeen, and I don’t know what to do with everything inside me.”

  “Coward. Seriously, Rad, you’re afraid of everything.”

  That’s when I burst into flames.

  “Am I?” I snarled.

  “Yes.” Jacqui pulled her bag up onto her shoulder. She couldn’t look in my face. I would have burnt her eyes. I was fire. “You’re afraid of me, at least, afraid of anything that has to do with love.”

  “I’m afraid of truck tires coming loose,” I growled. “I’m afraid my father will take a swan dive off that platform he built.”

  “Quite an image. But I’m not talking about truck tires or your father. I’m talking about you and love. We love each other, and you won’t let it happen. You won’t let it grow. You’re worried all the time, every second.”

  I wish my dead mother could have shown up this morning to talk me down, to talk to Jacqui. I wish she could have told my girlfriend to walk with me and let me find my balance. I wish —

  “Look at me,” I said. My heart crackling, burning black. “You have the courage to call me names, to talk about my dead mother and tell me what I’m afraid of, then you have the courage to look at me. We’re done, Jacqui. We’re islands on opposite sides of the world.”

  * * *

  ı

  The irony of being extremely emotional — angry, if that’s what you want to call it, since anger always speaks the loudest — is that my emotions —

  Put it this way. I feel and don’t feel at the same time.

  No. That’s not true.

  I feel sad, always sad, even when I’m angry. I’m sure it’s not really me who’s spinning away out of control. I mean, it’s me, Konrad Schoe, but it’s not me. There’s a difference between what my soul experiences and what my mind experiences. I feel as if I have to watch a second me feeling and doing all the wrong things. I watch myself out of control. I watch myself punching walls, laughing like a maniac, throwing glass pitchers full of water, threatening the one person I want to love, drunk with emotion. I say to myself, No, don’t. I say, Come back from the edge. I say, Stop.

  Stop, Rad. Stop, stop, stop.

  No.

  Please?

  No.

  I keep going and going until I’m drained, until I’m sober and straight. I have to watch myself helpless with my emotions. I have to feel ashamed. And sad.

  I don’t know if you can understand what this experience does to a person over time, especially if you’re not the kind of person who loses your self-control. Try to imagine or remember a time when you watched your life pass by, when you didn’t feel in control of your own experience, when maybe someone else made all the decisions. Did you ever have anyone take control of your life, even for a little while? Have you ever felt helpless to stop a car when you wanted it stopped? Have you ever been tickled or held hostage? Felt tormented by something you couldn’t figure out?

  The difference is that I have to take responsibility for everything I say and do, even when I have no control over myself. I always have
to take responsibility for how I hurt or upset or anger other people, or for how I embarrass myself in public and private. I always have to answer for something.

  People who have rough minds actually feel more responsibility for what they are — and aren’t — than people who don’t have rough minds.

  Seriously. Who’s more responsible and less responsible at the same time than a total lunatic?

  It’s tiring. I’m seventeen, and for most of my life I’ve been praying to a god I don’t understand or know, a stranger god, to let me get some control over my heart and mind. That god never listens, never helps. I have asked that god to kill me, to let me die, and that god won’t let me get out of the world.

  So does this mean I ever get to be a coward? Do I get to make excuses or run from what I am and what I say? Can I blame someone else? My father? Key? Jacqui? This person or that person? Gods or devils?

  No. I feel what I feel, do what I do, say what I say. There’s just me. Even if it isn’t me.

  In my soul I’m not angry. In my soul I’m not out of control. In my soul I want peace.

  But everyone will tell you I’m angry, I’m uncontrollable, I’m unsafe.

  I think about going to that monastery to get some peace. Maybe the god I need for help lives on an island off the coast of France. Maybe it’ll be the monks who save me. Or the lonesomeness.

  I want to go to let other people off the hook. They won’t have to walk on eggshells. They won’t have to worry.

  That’s it, too, right? The worry the people who might love me or like me could feel. The fear. When will I get angry at a person who will kick the crap out of me? When will I throw myself in front of a bus or —

  Lose my mind for good?

  Or, as Key said, when will I die from fighting with my own emotions, my own mind and heart?

  Get hold of yourself, Rad. Get hold of yourself.

  A monastery would be like quarantine. It would be a place to go that would keep me and everyone else out of harm’s way. Maybe.

  I could be quiet there.

  And it’s on an island.

  FIVE

  Imagine a person struck with a deadly sickness, an awful cancer. And, then, to everyone’s surprise: remission. Happiness. The sick one wakes up full of life, better than ever, and they act as if they haven’t just been suffering — or that you weren’t suffering with their suffering. They get up, walk, eat, go to work, see a movie. They don’t want to talk about what they missed. They don’t want to talk about the pain. They don’t want to talk about what will happen if they get worse again. They want to live.

  My father didn’t have cancer. He wasn’t terminally ill. He had made a choice.

  He decided to give up on life before my mother died. After my mother died, he didn’t change his mind. He didn’t say to himself, “My wife is gone. My children need me. My house needs attention. I’m up for it.”

  Nope.

  The house fell into disrepair. Little things at first — dripping faucets and loose doors and scummy walls, a blackgreen bathroom, the annoyances and blemishes and dirt and grime people put up with without much complaining, aware that it all should be better, but with no real motivation to keep up, especially when at the center of the home there’s a sense of hopelessness.

  Our house, now a dangerous eyesore, an embarrassment among the five other houses on our neat dead end, wasn’t always that way.

  Neglected. On and on, slow decay.

  When the roof started to go, three years after my mother died, when Key and I were twelve, when the weather came in, dripping and streaming down through rotten shingles, overhead lights, and seams in the ceilings, and when my brother and I lost our limited ability to keep up with cleaning — Key and I only did the laundry and cooking without knowing what more we should or could do — we confronted my father. It took all our courage, but he surprised us.

  Our father seemed to want to live again.

  You wouldn’t call our father a handy man, but he was no fool. Over three or four days, he read from a book on home repair. He stripped and patched and retiled the roof. And this somehow returned him to us for a spell. He moved around the house from this repair to that, cleaning, tightening, scraping, scrubbing, hammering. Doing. He made dinner once. A couple of times he drove Key and me to school or work, on errands here and there.

  Key went to my father like a kitten to a bowl of milk. But I held out.

  Once, as if he knew he had Key in his hand, my father put his hand on his shoulder, a gesture that passed for affection, and said, “Key.” Almost like he might have said, “I love you.”

  “Where you going now?” Key asked him.

  “Rehang the basement door.”

  That door hadn’t swung right since the house had begun to collapse and the foundation give way.

  “Does it make any sense?” I asked my brother when we were alone.

  “What? Dad?”

  “He just shows up because we asked him to? He’s a dad all of a sudden, able to do everything we need?”

  “Just like when we were little.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Key. He’s been gone a long time. Mom’s been gone a long time. And now look.”

  “It’s been days,” Key said. “He’s happy, so I’m happy.”

  “I just don’t understand. There’s a lot I don’t get.”

  “Like what?”

  “We don’t know what he’s really thinking, or if he’s really back. He hasn’t even mentioned Mom. He hasn’t talked about anything in years.”

  “But he’s here, and he seems like Dad.”

  “Seems.”

  “Okay. He is Dad.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “He sounds like Dad. He looks like Dad. But who is he?”

  “Dad,” Key said.

  “I know it won’t last. But it’s good to pretend he’s here now. Dad being Dad.”

  Those eleven days, when our father fixed the roof and worked around the house, when he seemed to come alive, I resisted him —

  It took me a little while, but my father finally lured me, too. And he lured me with a globe.

  * * *

  ı

  One of the reasons I had loved my father so much, until everything fell apart, until he abdicated, until my mother died —

  He had a way with me, a way of calming me down. He was a Rad whisperer. I don’t know how he did it. He was a quiet guy, not really one for talking much. He didn’t laugh a lot. He didn’t really like to be hugged or touched, at least not by Key and me. Only our mother could touch him whenever she wanted. He tolerated Key’s and my hugs, but I never thought he actually enjoyed them. He almost never touched us, instead waiting for us to go to him. Maybe he worried he would be too rough. He was a big man, but not enormous. He acted, though, as if his hands were made of concrete, as if he would hurt us even when he tried to be gentle.

  My father’s number-one quality before everything went sideways? He loved our mother. He loved her with everything inside of him. You could see it in his eyes, and you could see it in how he carried himself around her, as if he didn’t want his size or bulk to take any of the air that belonged to her. He loved her every second of every day, and we knew he would die for her. Key and I knew he would die for us, too. We trusted him. We trusted him right up until the time when we couldn’t.

  I trusted him. He made sure my brother and I were safe and comfortable in little and big ways, like fixing us tea — all of this way before Mom died — or bringing us glasses of water or mixing up oatmeal. He vacuumed our rooms and washed our clothes. He took us to the doctor. He cared for us. He never let up. He cared all the time. From the moment he woke up to the moment he went to sleep. I think he thought about us even in his sleep, in his dreams. His love for us seemed infinite.

  When I was nine, the year Mom died, I fell in love with mag
ic. Once, on one of the rare days when my mother had the energy to take us out, Key and me, we stopped in a coffee shop for a few minutes to use the bathroom. While I waited, I found an audience in an old man who was just minding his own business. I must have shown him four or five simple little tricks, my whole repertoire, and then my mother came with Key.

  “Oh, gosh,” my mother said. “Has my son been bothering you?”

  “No, no,” the man said. “Not at all. He’s a very charming boy, and he’s been showing me his magic.”

  “Has he?” My mother smiled down at me. “Well, we’ll take the show on the road.”

  “One moment,” said the man. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket. “Hold out your hand, son.”

  I held out my hand.

  “You’ll agree this is a plain blue handkerchief?” The man showed me both sides of the handkerchief.

  I nodded.

  “I’m going to fold this handkerchief into the palm of your hand.” The man did as he said, folding the handkerchief eight times into a little square. He held it in place with the tip of his finger. “Close up your hand,” he said. “A tight fist.”

  The man waved his hand over my fist, under my fist, and he mumbled a little something, something I couldn’t quite hear, but I knew they were powerful and dark words.

  “Now,” he said, “open up your hand.”

  When I opened my hand, there was a square of something, but not the handkerchief.

  Paper —

  “Go ahead,” the man said. “Open it up.”

  I was caught somewhere between happy and frightened, but I opened up the square.

  A fifty-dollar bill, one crisp Ulysses Grant. A fortune.

  “Mom,” I said. “Look.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” my mother said. She wouldn’t take the bill. “Now give the money back to the man.”

  “No,” the man said. “It’s not mine to take. It belongs to your son. Or to you.”

  “No, sir, we can’t,” my mother said. “Please give it back, Rad.”

  “Madam,” said the man. “It’s magic. Nothing else.”