by Paul Theroux
If Sharkey mentioned a surfer who had planted himself headfirst on a reef, she could counter with the head trauma of a motorcyclist tipped into the path of an oncoming car. She was unshockable in the face of physical injuries. If anything, the sight of a mangled body made her more efficient, more studious and attentive—as she’d been the first day he’d seen her in the house at V-Land, reviving with the kiss of life a boy who’d overdosed—so Sharkey’s stories did not mean much to her. Human cruelty was to her the great offense; it was all the worse when it was bloodless, and so “I hit a drunk homeless guy” was an outrageous statement, one she found hard to forgive or explain.
Sharkey had not noticed anything unusual. In his improvisational life, the awkward or intrusive incidents that had preceded the collision had at the time seemed unremarkable, more annoyances than portents. He was as confident in his daily life on land as he was on the water, where he could ride any wave that lifted him.
Surfing was the pulse and passion of his life, not like a sport that involved catching a ball or swinging a bat, and not a recreation either. It was a way of living your life that only other surfers understood—even the posers and punks who’d somewhat spoiled it; and good waves took precedence over everything on land. When the surf was up Sharkey was on it, no matter what else was happening. And nothing was compatible with surfing—no job, no enterprise, no other event. Surfing had dominated his existence, made him a hooky-playing student and a wayward son but a happy man. At just the point he was criticized by his disapproving mother—then a recent widow—for spending so much time in the water, when he had seemed so self-indulgent, he had begun to win surf contests and make money, on the tour and from appearance fees. He was well known at sixteen, a champion at seventeen, famous at twenty, a winner of the Pipeline Masters and the Eddie at Waimea, holder of the Triple Crown.
“Being on the water is all that matters,” he said, “and surfing is the best way of being on the water.”
Surfing was easy, everything else was hard; but he had been blessed. He was the luckiest man he knew, a success as a teenager doing something he loved, later living on endorsements and on the inheritance from his dead mother’s investments, in the most beautiful place he’d ever seen—and it was a surfer’s privilege to know the loveliest coastlines of the world.
He’d come with his parents to Hawaii as a ten-year-old, after bumping from one army base to another. His father, who had risen through the ranks, was promoted to colonel when they arrived at Fort Shafter, and was soon assigned a regiment and sent to Vietnam to command them as advisers, arming and training ARVN soldiers and Montagnard irregulars—the Degar people—in the Central Highlands to fight the Vietcong. Two tours, with frequent trips home, and on the second he’d been wounded, not by the enemy but in an accident, a hard chopper landing in Danang that crushed his spine. He was treated in Saigon, then airlifted to Tripler Hospital in Honolulu, where he died of liver failure.
“A sad memory,” Olive had said.
“He was someone I didn’t know anymore. Not the big intimidating colonel but a thin yellow man connected to plastic tubes, gasping to breathe.”
By then Sharkey had been in and out of two schools and was failing at a third.
His father’s death confused him, angered him, made him reckless. He found refuge in the waves. His mother, distraught, collected the insurance and, unexpectedly, a large inheritance from her husband’s family—cash, a stock portfolio, real estate on the mainland. There was money now where once there had been a man.
Her money kept his mother suspicious of suitors, and single. She had boyfriends, but she steered them away from her teenaged son, who was doing so poorly at school. Yet the boyfriends persisted in trying to befriend the boy, as a way of ingratiating themselves with his mother. They were either too stern or too indulgent, and Sharkey found them ridiculous in their attempts to interact with him, as though auditioning for the role of father and husband. It was known that Sharkey’s widowed mother was wealthy. She moved to a bigger house in Manoa, but by then Sharkey had been expelled from Punahou School and was struggling at Roosevelt High.
It had never been easy for him to be the son of an army colonel; it was even harder to be the son of a rich widow.
“I’m not going to marry again,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Joe. I wouldn’t do it to myself. A woman with money would be a fool to get married.”
So in addition to the role of son he assumed the roles of husband, friend, confidant, lover almost—he held her, he soothed her, he listened to her complaints—and he was oppressed. Some days he wished she would die, and he was ashamed of that feeling in himself. Knowing that she was a burden on him, she said frankly that if he looked after her and kept her safe and remained her companion—“companion” meant everything: her friend, her walker, her support and comfort—he would never have to work; that on her death he would inherit everything she had. Just hearing that, he saw her small coffin.
This promise made her contemptuous and him cynical, but it bound them together in a bitter bargain, each one trying to prove the opposite of what they felt. Some days the power was hers, other days his, and in that seesawing way it was like a love affair—or something resembling the lingering end of an affair, each one hanging on, insecure, fearful of letting go, and resentful, as when his mother didn’t get her way she wept, and he wanted to scream, not at her but at himself.
He tried to please her and of course he failed: she would not allow him the satisfaction of pleasing her, because that would make him confident, and she might lose him. Sharkey understood her manipulation, and there were days when he saw her—stiff permed hair, makeup that gave her a floury face—propped up in the armchair where his father had once sat, and he pitied her for the drunken buzz in her tiny head. She reminded him of an animal holding still so that it will not be seen, like a rabbit stiffening on a shadowy late-afternoon lawn but standing out, the more obvious for its stillness in the breeze. She sat, and she drank.
He was saved by the sea, he thrived offshore. He found a school friend, a surfer, a misfit like himself, who introduced him to the moves and vouched for him at the beach, where he was guided by an older surfer—Uncle Sunshine. His form of rebellion was to swim away, and in time to surf the most dangerous waves, to build his confidence and to scare his mother; in doing so, he made his reputation. His mother did not understand enough of surfing or the power of the waves to be scared, and that frustrated him. Sometimes his mother insisted on attending his surf meets, taking photos of him while sitting in a folding chair under a wide-brimmed hat, on the sand—the only surfer parent on the beach, watching with admiration, possessing him by showing up, by her very presence keeping the girls away—the girls half fearful of the widow and half respectful of the loyal son, but also mocking both.
All this time he was a student, first at Radford with the other army brats, then—with their move to Manoa Valley—at Punahou, where he was intelligent enough to do little work and still manage to pass but was soon expelled for smoking pakalolo and finally sent to Roosevelt, where he was one of the few haoles, failing in his studies and bullied by the tough local boys. Hating school, he escaped to the beach, surfed most days, and longed to go away, to be free of his mother. He dropped out of Roosevelt and devoted all his days to surfing. He traveled to the mainland, and at Mavericks he saw his first epic waves—sixty-footers—and later added Jaws on Maui and Cortes Bank to these monsters, and still searched for a hundred-foot wave to ride.
By then he was on the world tour and had his first tattoos. He traveled—to Portugal and Spain, and Bali, his mother saying that she wanted to follow him; but the effort was too great, the flights too long. He managed to exhaust her. She stayed home, like a wife abandoned, and welcomed the attention of men. She queened it with her suitors, amused by their promises and flattery, and in this ideal situation fell into a casual decadence, drinking too much, indulging herself, encouraging the men just so far and then rejecting them, reverting
to a sudden iciness that was itself perverse.
Sharkey traveled the world, wherever there was surf—and there was surf on almost every coast, at the edge of every continent, on most Pacific islands. You could not be a big-wave surfer, or surf year-round, without being a traveler.
And when he began to make money, in contests and from endorsements and appearances—he was still in his twenties—he became defiant; and his mother knew her hold on him was weakening. The money was modest, but it pleased him that it came so easily. Being away from her made him independent, and she objected; she wanted her boy back, not realizing that in her stubbornness she had made him succeed; her selfishness had kept him away, and being away from her had made him a man.
His mother complained of obscure aches and pains, which Sharkey disbelieved, regarding her complaints as attention-seeking. In what seemed like an act of revenge his mother broke her hip, became an invalid, and died. He inherited everything his mother owned—money, property, the investments, the stock portfolio. And he knew a greater freedom, more travel, continuing success as a surfer, more latitude in his search for the hundred-foot wave. He had always guessed that he would not be wholly free until his mother was dead. He was released, to fall in love, but the feeling that he had wished his mother dead—that had he believed her in her misery, he might have lengthened her life—this guilt never left him. That, and something else he could not undo.
Saying he was too grief-stricken to view her body, he received her ashes by mail and scattered them off Shark’s Cove on a day of big surf that would disperse them, perhaps dissolve them. As the dust of her remains left his fingers he was given life, a fortune, a long career as a surfer that was easily summed up.
He was interviewed often, and always he was described as a natural waterman, with effortless grace and bravery, able to ride the biggest waves, imitated by many, admired by nearly everyone, envied, and praised, but not loved—surfers were too selfish and single-minded to be loved. He had achieved his goal of riding a one-hundred-foot wave, which was not a wave but a life on the water.
* * *
This was what most people knew of Sharkey, the account of his life that he offered to interviewers, such as the young woman from the surfing magazine who said, “This is the hardest assignment I’ve ever had. You have everything, especially that thing that makes you impossible to write about—you’re happy.”
But, like most of what people tell you about themselves, little of this was accurate. Because the messy essentials, the painful, shaming episodes, were left out; this version of Sharkey was misleading, and incomplete, and much of it false.
6
Portents
The unexpected happens—a comic or odd blindside,” Sharkey was saying to Olive, “and at the time you smile. Then afterward you understand that events give off power. The vibes affect you. And when you see that they were warnings and omens you get the shudders, like coming off a big wave you’d ridden mindlessly and you think, ‘Man, I could have died.’”
Staring at him as if he were someone approaching her on a sidewalk, as though trying to decide if he was a man she knew, Olive said simply, in a small, certain voice, “But it was the bloke on the push-bike that died.”
“It’s all pau,” Sharkey said.
She still stared at him, wondering at the word, meaning “done,” and waiting for more.
“I should have seen it coming,” he said. He smiled to think that he hadn’t paid attention to the portents. He’d been tapped on the shoulder but he hadn’t turned around. “I ignored the warnings. It cost me.”
“Cost that poor bloke his life, you mean.” Her disbelief was concentrated in her squinting tone.
“Totally freaked me out,” Sharkey said, looking away.
“What are you talking about?” Yes, she thought, he seemed like a stranger, one speaking in a different language, a foreigner, oblivious, half deaf. So, trying to make him understand, she spoke as though to a child.
He did not have words to describe to her how he felt—that after the accident his life seemed to stall, to falter and then to skip backward. And that he seemed to separate from himself and become a bystander to his own life, watching without comprehension but amazed that he was offered this perspective, as his own shadow. The experience was pleasantly bewildering, because there was no threat. It is not dangerous to be your own double, he thought. But it was illogical, like a dream, full of absurdities, vaguely shameful. He watched like a passive onlooker as this deepening stillness took hold, sinking to a tedium he found restful, especially after the hallucinatory suddenness of the accident. That crash had been a seismic sucker punch, like a reef rising up to knock him from his board and hammer the board apart.
Now inert, dull-minded, becalmed, and enlarged by the tedium, the way indolent people grow fat—but the fatness was in his head—he recalled a slow succession of awkward incidents. Though strange, they had seemed fairly normal by Hawaii standards. The North Shore, he liked to think, was the edge of the known world, the absolute limit: beyond it was unreadable ocean, strange lands.
But after the accident these little episodes seemed to have the weight and meaning of portents. None had occurred on the water—water was his element; all had happened on land, many of them after he’d just come ashore.
It was as though—he imagined—he’d been singled out, and someone, or some sentient force, had been speaking to him; and he hadn’t paid attention. Had he listened, heeding the warnings, there might have been no accident. There would have been no revelation for him, and no story, nothing to tell. If he’d been alert and known the implications, his life would have been undisturbed and remained the fiction he contrived to make it.
An accident is a surprise, unanticipated, a happenstance. But this, he now saw, had been foretold, because there was a meaning in all events and it is their accumulation that gives them form and meaning and makes them readable. It was not a single thing, it was many, and they made a pattern that sprawled and became logical and had a meaning.
He now knew exactly when it had all begun—the day, the time, the place. He had been driving from the post office at Waialua a few minutes past four o’clock on a Friday—the office had just closed for the day—and he’d seen a woman at the bus stop near the playground at the Waialua Elementary School. She’d been conspicuous, burdened by a large black bag. She was attractive at a distance, and when she signaled to him, he slowed down to look. Up close, she was fleshy, with greeny-gray eyes and a sensuality in her direct gaze, seeming to challenge him, not only with her eyes but with her full lips, even her posture, leaning at him. She was alone.
She had gestured to him with a tennis racket. That was to him her distinguishing feature. Without the tennis racket she was a brooding dusky woman, heavy for her height, standing by the road. With the racket in her hand, she was a tennis player, probably with a powerful forehand, heading home after a match at the school’s courts. And that was another thing—her being so near the school, an hour after the end of classes, suggested she was a teacher.
She was wearing a floppy-brimmed hat and white tennis shoes and loosely fitting shorts, and her black bag was full—of what? He could not see. But his calculations gave him confidence; even as he was slowing down he had decided who she was—a teacher; how she’d spent the past hour or so—playing tennis; that her car was at the garage—why else would she be at the bus stop? Sharkey believed himself to be a shrewd judge of people; a surfer who traveled widely had to be insightful in sizing up strangers, because a surfer, naked on a foreign beach, could so easily be preyed upon—the boys with rusty spears who had assaulted him on a shore in New Guinea were just one instance.
He raked at the clutter on the passenger seat—his hat, his keys, a water bottle, a pair of pliers, a damp towel—and tossed them into the backseat as he drew up and slowed beside the woman.
“You want a ride?”
Without a word—pressing her lips together in effort—she fumbled with her bulgy bag and the te
nnis racket and pulled the door open. She got in, seating herself heavily, then snatching the door shut hard enough to rattle the window, looking too fussed and preoccupied to reply.
Starting away, Sharkey said, “Where are you headed?”
The woman grunted and, lifting her free hand, pointed into the windshield.
“I’m going to Hale‘iwa,” Sharkey said.
Instead of responding, the woman sat back, resting her bag on her fat knees and placing her tennis racket on the bag.
“Playing some tennis?” Sharkey asked, and glanced at her.
The woman scowled, lowering her head, and Sharkey saw that she had pitted cheeks, a smudge of dust on her chin, and her thumb, curled on the tennis racket, was dirty, the nail tip black. Her shorts too were not clean, with a stain like a rime mark of an old spill that had dried. And now he remembered like an afterimage from the bus stop that her tennis shoes were ragged and unlaced.
But the tennis racket was new and well strung, and she clung to it like a prestige object. It was this that gave her plausibility, even authority, though she remained silent—and at first her wordlessness helped her, the way a silent person can seem assertive, making us jabber. But Sharkey was less sure now. He had seen her dirty thumb, her bad skin, the stain on her shorts, and something else, a thin high whine of stink that might have been hers but could also have been a hum from Waialua Creek, which they were passing.
“Because if it’s not Hale‘iwa”—he needed to get this straight—“I’m not going farther than the community center.”
