Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  The pregnancy was not a provisional state; it was a child within her, growing bigger each day—not a cluster of cells, fishlike in the water of her womb, but a little person, with a head and arms and feet, with fingers and toes, waiting to be released, to become—she saw this too—a swimmer in the world, a companion, a friend, a joy and a consolation. That was what she saw, that was what she had lost.

  And Sharkey, who had been so enthusiastic about the child—the potential surfer, buddy, dude—had lost his fervor, did not seem to remember now that she’d been pregnant. He sank back into his half-smiling delusion in which he believed he was active, the waterman, the gardener, the chicken farmer, the orchid-grower. Yet he hardly left the house.

  Thinking back to his rescuing her when she’d panicked in the waves at Leftovers, she now remembered how slow he’d been to see her, how clumsily he’d dug at the water with one hand while holding his boogie board—and she’d clung to him, feeling the struggle in his shoulders, and that tension had added to her fear. She’d sensed that he was weakening, not the Waimea lifeguard she’d known, nor the Sharkey who refused to be towed, who paddled out and dropped in to ride the long faces of waves on big North Shore days. He was slower and uncertain, and why?

  In the suddenness of blood at the beach, the scorching pain of the miscarriage—the mess, his bewilderment, her grief—she hadn’t given much thought to his insisting that they swim out to this distant wave, farther than Chun’s or Alligators or the others. And he had abandoned her there. Nor had she preoccupied herself with his clumsy rescue—his lumbering in the surf. But now it seemed to her that he had contributed to the loss of the baby—and more, that it was another disturbing feature of this recent life of his, a blundering, a vagueness, a forgetting, a step backward, another accident, a repetition in the limbo that was his life now.

  It was hard for her to admit that this strong person was weakened, or if not weakened physically, then diminished; that he needed her and that his dependence on her was something he still could not acknowledge.

  It was news: that in the seemingly endless repetition of life—the back-and-forth—there was something imperceptible, a slowing, a diminution of vitality, and so the apparent sameness was misleading. He repeated his stories, but at the same time he abbreviated them in the slippage of his memory. His life appeared to be going in circles, but they were narrowing circles.

  She saw something moribund in it: in the house, which had acquired a clammy gloom; in Sharkey, who seldom exerted himself—which was why the day at Leftovers had been a disaster. He sat and stewed, and when she returned to him after work every day he would tell her a story she already knew, that he’d told her before.

  What was wrong? It was not just his stopped life but also his visible deterioration. Sameness is never sameness when it is so persistent in nature; sameness is decay. It was bad enough that in his world nothing was new, but the truth was that he was growing smaller, his aura dimming, and his world too was shrinking.

  On the evening she returned and he began with a fixed smirk (he was holding a joint) to tell her again of the business with the package of pakalolo that Moe Kahiko had sent to him, she remembered that he’d first begun this story in the car moments before he’d hit and killed the cyclist.

  “I done a bad ting,” he said in Moe’s dull, droopy voice.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “We can’t go on like this.”

  But Sharkey kept talking.

  She leaned at him and said, “Don’t. Please park it.”

  He stopped talking yet kept his facial expression, Moe’s frown, exaggerated, foolish, obtuse. It had been a good enough story the first time. Now, like all the others, it was monotony, noise in her ears and eyes. She wanted to scream.

  “What’s your deal?” he said.

  “My deal,” she said, and thoughts fluttered in her head, winged things slapping into each other and against her skull, rousing other thoughts, sending them flying, waking them to fury—none would settle, none would roost, all of them squawked for attention or beat their wings behind her eyes. She pressed her head to quiet them.

  “You’re fretting again,” he said, like a boast, a big confident put-down.

  “Not fretting.”

  “What then?”

  “Desperate,” she said. “Don’t you understand? I just lost a baby in the surf at Leftovers while you were pulling me to shore. I’m not blaming you, though the wave seemed a mile away and maybe I started losing it as I paddled out. But you don’t remember that—you don’t remember anything. I think it was an omen like all the other omens, that nothing in our lives would go right. Nothing has gone right since the day of the accident—it’s been one bloody thing after another, nothing has been normal. You were acting strange. I tried to get away. I discovered I was pregnant—you seemed happy about it, and then, wouldn’t you know, I lost the baby in all that surf. And my nausea has gone away. I’m sleeping better. I have no cramps. I’ve recovered my health. I’m seeing things clearly. And”—here her voice broke—“I’m desperate.”

  Sharkey listened to this without an expression, though it seemed to her that he had a fixed look of mild impatience, as though listening to her speaking was just a question of waiting for her to finish—not objecting to anything she said, because in a short while she would be exhausted and done, delivered of her complaint. Then they could go on, eat something, smoke a joint, go to bed early—and with this in mind he yawned.

  Olive was breathing hard; her rant had made her head ring.

  Sharkey squinted at her and said, “The accident—what about it?”

  “You remember it?”

  He stuck his lower lip out, equivocating. She knew that face of his, she knew all his facial expressions, they were often a boy’s obstinacy, the reactions of someone who hated to explain. This one meant I don’t understand what you’re driving at, but even if I did understand I wouldn’t care. And it maddened her to see this response form on his face.

  “That drunk homeless guy.”

  “It was a man,” she said, her voice rising. “You killed him.”

  An accident, he thought; an obstacle, like many he’d surfed in his life.

  Like dropping into a mushy wave at a break he’d never surfed before and finding as he cut left that it was not mushy at all but instead the curved face of a slowly forming barrel, overtopping him until, in seconds, he was in the tube, shacked as though in a cave of blue ice, and seeing only a narrowing lozenge of light at the far end, which was his only salvation as long as he steadied himself in a crouch and maintained his speed, but he did not know for sure whether he would make it out of the barrel upright until he succeeded and burst into the blaze of sun, the barrel breaking, squeezing and closing behind him like snatching hands in a smash of heavy water.

  Those waves, so many rides on the sea and on land. He saw that he had surfed through life and that he had trained himself to overcome the opposition of so many people—school and home and the casual assaults of locals. He’d done nothing but surf. Roosevelt High School was a wave, girlfriends were waves, debt was a wave, guilt another wave, sex was a fun wave, his brief marriage a junk wave, his mother one of the trickiest waves, and he’d sometimes wiped out or suffered a hold-down, but he had always made it to shore and gone on surfing. Me and my stick: there is no other way I know how to live. Every ride prepared him for the next one, until it seemed the whole of life involved surfing from one wave to another.

  That drunk homeless guy on the old bike at Waimea that Olive kept mentioning—he was a wave that Sharkey had ridden to safety, and he was onshore again, contemplating another wave.

  Introspection wearied him, like the shudder and rumble of an engine running. He was unused to it, his head heavy with the weight of these reflections, and he was out of words. He lifted his eyes to Olive, yet his eyes said nothing.

  But Olive was grimly satisfied. It seemed that he had lapsed into his old indifference, because it helped prove her point.
/>   “Don’t you see that since then—since killing that poor man—nothing has gone right?”

  He still eyed her, his head at a slight angle, and she knew it meant defiance and doubt: I don’t see what you’re seeing, and therefore you’re mistaken.

  “Maybe you don’t see it,” she said, replying to the expression on his face. “I don’t blame you. I think it was traumatic for you, killing that man. But I see it and I think I’m losing you. You’re suffering some kind of weird hangover, like you’ve been on an epic bender. You seldom go out, though you say you do. You sit staring at the trees. Half the time you don’t feed the animals, and I do it, or I get Moe Kahiko to do it.” She thought a moment, breathing hard. “You repeat yourself, the same stories, none of them new—and I mean, I’m sorry, but it’s horrible to hear you repeat them.”

  She kept herself from saying, “And it’s a flaming bloody bore,” though the words were in her mouth.

  “So what?” he said.

  “The same stories.”

  “Everyone does that,” he said, and from his sour tone she saw that she’d stung him. He was proud of the way he could hold a room of listeners with his stories—of surfing, of travel, of near escapes, of big waves, unusual people, strange meals, distant coasts. He sat on the bright beach like a Sun King and charmed men and wooed women with his stories. Hearing his stories, Hunter Thompson had said, “You could have been a writer.”

  “Yes. Everyone does that, but not like you—the same stories, the same days, the same you. When did the accident happen?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “Six weeks ago. It was a Saturday night. I marked it in my daybook.” She searched his face for a reaction. “What has happened since?”

  He shook his head and blinked—not I don’t know, but It doesn’t matter.

  “Nothing,” she said, answering her own question. “You sit, though you say you’re surfing. You don’t eat unless I’m cooking and urging you to. And nothing’s new, everything’s stale, and you know what that means?”

  Still, he was unmoved; he examined his fingers, picking at them, his monkey grooming.

  “You made me pregnant,” she said. “We were hopeful. I took it as a sign. Then I lost the baby. Losing it was the real sign.”

  He seemed to strain, to take this in. He mumbled, “Blood in the water.”

  She dropped to her knees and held him, and could not keep herself from tears, though she wasn’t crying.

  “I remember the blood,” he said. “No one forgets blood.”

  “It was a baby.” She said it in a pleading voice, and moaned in sorrow. Then she breathed deeply to clear her head, and when she had her composure back she continued. “It all adds up.”

  “Some kind of curse,” he said, but without emotion—just asking.

  “No, no,” she said, and gripped his legs and looked up at him in his chair. “It’s not witchcraft. It’s a shadow hanging over you—and so it’s over me too. Something like denial. Don’t you feel it?”

  He made a face—it wasn’t dismissive, it was thoughtful: in some dim recess of his brain he had heard her. Instead of replying, he sighed, long and loud, a tremor of resignation.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  To Olive this admission was like a victory: he was no longer indifferent, or certain in his arrogance. She said, “Tell me honestly, how do you feel?”

  “You mean about the accident?”

  “Yes, killing the man.”

  “I feel it hasn’t happened yet.”

  This took her by surprise. She said, “I don’t get it.”

  “The collision,” he said.

  “Hitting the man. Killing him.”

  “A collision isn’t one person hitting another—it’s when they both hit at once. A guy on a bike and a man in a car going bang.” He said this in a soft explaining tone. Then he frowned, pressing his lips together. He said, “It’s like I’m waiting for it to happen.”

  “But it happened.” She thought, He hasn’t processed it, he’s still trying to understand it, he can’t face it.

  “Did it?” he asked. “Most days I wake up happy, but I might remember a little detail or two. And then I shut it off. I figure someday I will wake up and I won’t remember anything. It won’t happen.” A smile flickered on his lips. “See?”

  He was like a small boy in his denial; even his tone of voice was whispered and weak and bewildered, this sunburned and tattooed and muscular man, childlike.

  “It was a man,” she said. “He died.”

  He blinked again, a small boy, shrinking in his confusion.

  “You ran into him.”

  “Collision,” he said, correcting her. “It was dark.”

  “I know. A bad night.”

  “All that rain,” he said. “My sore foot on the brake.”

  He seemed to be simplifying and excusing himself again. She spoke softly: “You killed that man.”

  This registered as creases at the sides of his eyes, and in his hurt eyes too; the words had pierced him.

  “And all that bad luck since then,” she said. She wanted to add, Bad for you, but it’s dogging me too, living with your darkness, losing the baby. So often with him—and often nursing her sicker, more fragile patients—she had two conversations, the one she spoke aloud, the one she suppressed and kept to herself.

  He reached for her, took her small clean hand in his big cracked one, with an eye tattooed at the center of his palm. Clumsy consolation, but perhaps he understood her pain.

  “You don’t know his name,” she said, and hearing nothing from him, added, “Do you?”

  His “No” was the tissue of a breath.

  “Or anything about him. Where he was born. His family, if he had one. How he lived. Where he’s buried.”

  Still he clutched her soft hand in his rough hand against his leg as she sat before him, and she could feel something like thought in the flesh of his palm and his sinewy fingers. It helped that she was not facing him when she said this, that the voice rose from where she sat, muted, like smoke curling to his head while he stared at the branches outside that were lit by the window.

  “We need to know.”

  She spoke with insistence, and that tone, severe for the first time, checked him. He let go of her hand, dropped it, and got up and stretched, standing before her.

  “This is so heavy,” he said.

  “And?” she said, hoping for more.

  “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

  That was not what she wanted, yet she felt she’d made progress, and in trying to explain to him the impasse—the stalled life, the bad luck (she resisted calling it karma)—she’d clarified it for herself; found the words for it. Explaining it to him was a way of explaining it to herself.

  But the next morning he was out of bed as she was just waking.

  “Big day,” he said.

  “I thought we were going to talk.”

  “Yes. Definitely. But I’m going out first. Surf’s up this morning. Dropping this afternoon. Outta here.”

  With that he was out of the room, heading to the garage to strap the board on his car. And she felt winded—defeated. That was his life, one evasion after another. I’m not into sitting around, man. He would never face the fact of what he had done; he would never understand the effect it had had on his life, that it had cast a shadow over it, and he would live the rest of his life in that shadow, his narrowing existence of bad luck and delay and aborted hope. If she stayed with him her own life would be no better.

  One of his earliest stories ended with his saying, “So you get on a plane. You have great karma—you’re stoked, looking forward to the flight and the vacation. You’re totally in tune with your karma. But what you don’t know is that the pilot has bad karma. And he crashes the plane.”

  It had touched her at the time, and she’d smiled. “I never thought of that,” she said. Now it seemed like a dire warning.

  Olive packed for the second tim
e, filled two suitcases with her clothes, emptied the bedside table of her books, murmuring in his voice “Outta here.” She was late for work but put all her things on the lanai, intending to pick them up later. Her last glimpse of them saddened her because the things themselves looked sad: the two old bags, the battered cardboard box, a small deformed valise—she saw her whole life in a compact pile. It seemed a negligible accumulation of clobber, and she recognized herself in their bumps and surface damage. She reminded herself of her age—thirty-eight, still capable of childbearing—and thought, I’m portable. Everything she owned in the world could fit in the trunk of her car. She was sad, she was happy, and then she saw herself as though in a movie, a dramatic moment glimpsed from a high camera angle, a valiant woman, moving out to begin again. She wanted to dislike Sharkey, but when she considered him and what had happened, she felt only pity.

  Still, goodbye. Outta here. Jolly well done with him.

  Seeing Luana in the cafeteria with another woman in scrubs—a doctor, wearing her stethoscope like a badge—she waved, and backed away. But Luana beckoned and introduced the woman.

  “This Dr. Agawa. She stay all over!”

  Dr. Agawa—Japanese, slim, petite, sweet-faced—turned out to be a surfer, running a clinic in the Solomon Islands. “My clinic was on Santa Isabel, so I’m lucky. Good surf at Papatura.”

  “Good surf here,” Luana said. “Da bess. Big, da waves!”

  “I’m locum here for this month,” Dr. Agawa said to Olive.

  “How are you liking it?”

  Before she could answer, Luana said, “Funny case today. Family members bring him in. Got no mojo, they said. Just staring out the window. Not eating.”

  As though to calm Luana’s ebullience, Dr. Agawa lowered her head and said in an earnest whisper, “Give-up-itis—it’s a serious condition.”

  “Give-up-itis is a diagnosis?” Olive said.

  “I’ve seen it in the Solomons. It’s been written about. You know, abulia—lack of willpower, someone fading away.”