by Paul Theroux
“Straight from high school.”
“What was his outfit?”
“Says here Eleventh Armored Calvary Regiment. Look,” she said, passing the file to Sharkey, “a kind of insignia.”
“They call that a patch. Black Horse. What was his rank, did you say?”
“Gunnery sergeant.”
“Not all these guys went to Vietnam. He might have spent the war driving a desk in Omaha.”
“Turn the page,” she said. “Look at ‘Assignments and Geographical Location.’”
“You read this already?”
“There’s not much to read. Bare facts. But look where he served.”
Sharkey lifted the paper to his face. “Bien Hoa. Operation Fish Hook.”
“Operation Fish Hook—I mugged up on it,” Olive said. “May 1970, an incursion into Cambodia, less than a year after he enlisted and was shipped over. It was pretty famous, because it was an invasion, probably illegal. But it was on the Ho Chi Minh Trail—a big depot, just over the border. A huge firefight and the destruction of a whole arsenal of weapons—lots of American casualties, but obviously not our boy.”
Chastened by her quiet recitation of facts, Sharkey said, “Where did you find this out?”
“This morning—ten minutes on my computer. It’s all online.”
“‘Go online.’ That’s another expression I hate. Like ‘Do the paperwork.’” He began to sigh in frustration.
“Calm down. Look what else I found. This is the man. Check out the next page.”
Sharkey lifted the page. He read, “Awards and Decorations.”
“Out loud, Joe.”
“National Defense Service Medal. Vietnam Service Medal. Vietnam Campaign Medal. Expert Badge Rifle M-16. Presidential Unit Citation Award for Ninety Days or More in Combat.” Sharkey’s voice had slowed and softened as he’d gone down the list. “Purple Heart with Oak Leaf,” he said in a whisper, and handed the file to Olive.
She said, “He wasn’t driving a desk in Omaha.”
“My father would have loved this guy.”
“There’s more,” Olive said. “It gets better.”
She flicked through another file folder and brought out a document, this one more elegant than the birth certificate, with an etched border and the man’s name inked in the middle, ennobled in ornate script.
“University of California at Santa Cruz, Class of ’74. Bachelor’s degree—electrical engineering.” She handed the certificate to Sharkey, saying, “Do the math. Born in 1950. After his tour in ’Nam he’s still a kid. He gets the GI Bill. Finances his education. He’s only twenty-four when he graduates.”
“Could have been at Mavericks. That’s what I was doing around that time.”
The mention of Santa Cruz, his memories of Half Moon Bay, helped him see the man more clearly—not his features, not as an individual, but the sort of young man—student, stoner, skateboarder—who gathered with friends at the edge of the bay on big days, peering from the parking lot or standing on the beach, looking admiringly at the surfers. Sharkey had always been eager to flash a shaka sign at them, to show he was from Hawaii.
“But he couldn’t have surfed it. Very few guys did then. I knew most of them.”
“Maybe he wasn’t into big waves,” Olive said.
“He ended up in Hawaii, though.”
“We don’t know when. That’s not in these docs. But there’re a few clues. Remember what Stickney said about the speeding ticket?”
Sharkey glanced at the paper in his hand as though he might find the answer on it. For a moment the name Stickney meant nothing to him, but Olive had said it earlier, and he knew it was connected to the documents on the table. His mind was not a blank; it pulsed with movement, a swirl of bubbles in water tumbling above him, twisting him deeper, the daylight dimming in the water as he was pressed beneath the wave, losing the ability to know which way to swim, buried alive in the turbulence.
Dazed by the vision, he said, “What was the question?”
Olive repeated it: Stickney. California. Max Mulgrave. The speeding ticket. Clocked at 142 miles per hour.
“That’s cranking,” Sharkey said.
“Remember? Stickney asked what kind of car goes that fast?”
“Muscle car.”
“Look at the ticket,” Olive said. “All these documents contain bare facts. But some facts are more telling than others.”
Sharkey was reading in his usual way, like a blind man, his fingers tracing the surface of the ticket, moving from line to line as though touching Braille dots.
“Ferrari. An ’84 Testarossa,” he finally said. “Where do you get a car like that?”
“The letterhead on the next page might offer a clue.”
Sharkey slipped the photocopy of the ticket aside. His fingers crept toward the bold print at the top of the page, Max Integer—but except for that name, the page was blank.
“Max Integer,” he said, touching the name. “Some kind of company?”
“An integer’s a number. His software company. See the address? Santa Clara. He was one of the pioneers in Silicon Valley. God knows what sort of stuff he made—some kind of software. He must have started the company sometime in the ’70s, after he graduated. The speeding ticket says a lot about his income. It gives his home address in Cupertino. Still there—I Googled it—a mansion behind a wall. And I looked up Max Integer. Symantec offered big money for the company in ’82, papers speculated the purchase price in the tens of millions.”
“He was rich,” Sharkey said, and saying so, he did not know him anymore. As a possible surfer he had a presence, a hard body; as a soldier, a uniform; as a student too he had a certain substance among books and was almost recognizable. But as a millionaire he was an elusive wisp camouflaged by expensive clothes, or sitting in a sports car, or hidden in a villa. That’s how the rich lived—they hid themselves, they were almost unknowable, they were their possessions, cars and clothes and real estate. You never saw one in Hawaii without humungous sunglasses, you never saw one on the North Shore. They hid in Kahala, surrounded by walls, and their gardeners chased you off the beach.
This man had no face, no physicality, he was not flesh; he was money, and money said nothing. Money was camo, it made him inaccessible.
“Really rich,” Olive said.
“Riding a junk bike in the rain at Waimea.” He handed the file folder to her.
She placed the folder with the others on the table, handling it with care, a sort of dignified formality, as though concluding a ritual, one that Sharkey was relieved to see ending. The mass of paper had confused him, the documents were hard to read, the print was small, some of it made no sense to him. Such documents needed to be interpreted, studied, comprehended, turned into basic English, and even then they hardly hung together.
Sharkey was relieved to see Olive gathering the loose paper, making a single pile, a stack of folders. He smiled when he saw her slip the stack into her canvas tote, the one she carried to the hospital. He thought, Take the paper away from me.
“So what do we know?” she said.
“We know who he was. Max Mulgrave. That was the guy.”
“That you killed.”
Sharkey clawed at his face, rubbed his eyes; he sighed; he said, “Yes, yes. Okay, I know. It’s all there, in the paperwork.”
“The drunk homeless guy,” Olive said.
This silenced Sharkey, because just as the man had begun to come into focus, as a surfer or a soldier, he had dissolved and become indistinct, lost and distorted in the thick green camouflage of money.
“You know his name. His military record. His university. His business. But you don’t know who he is. Think about it—if someone knew your name, what would they know about you?”
“A lot,” Sharkey said. “That I won the Triple Crown. Endorsements. That I surfed Tahiti and Nazaré. Rocked the Pipe. Shredded Waimea.”
“And what would that add up to?” she said.
As she was s
peaking, with those school-teacher questions, Sharkey thought how she had lost her looks, become plainer and plainer with each demand, not the woman he had loved. Her questions, the way she asked them, her flat voice, her pinched face, made her a stranger, an unattractive one, someone he wanted to run away from.
“Those bare facts”—she was still talking—“is that you?”
“I’m Joe Sharkey. The surfer. The whole world knows that.”
“You’re a sixty-two-year-old man,” Olive said, holding him still, piercing him with her stare. “You’re selfish, narcissistic, and ungrateful. You’ve spent your whole life doing whatever the bloody hell you’ve wanted to, living on your mother’s money. All I’ve ever heard from you is how awful the human race is, why most people are worthless, and why do women have children. You’ve had every advantage and you’re still a misanthrope—and for your information, that’s someone who hates people.”
“Say what you like. You’re trying to hurt my feelings. I don’t care.”
“I’m trying to save you,” she said.
“All those things you’re saying about me—selfish, ruthless—listen, if I hadn’t been like that, I would never have become a great surfer.”
She backed away, laughing, and her laugh shocked him—it was a hoot of defiance he’d not expected, and he raised his arms as though to deflect its mocking sound.
“You’re no bleeding way a great surfer,” she said. “Eddie was great. Kelly’s great. Garrett’s great. And you—you’re a good surfer. You told me you lost your endorsements a few years ago, when you stopped cooperating. You got lucky at Nazaré. Then you got lazy, and now you don’t surf at all. There are plenty of guys like you on the North Shore. Plenty in the world.”
“How many of them surfed big days at Waimea?”
She didn’t laugh this time to caution him. She whispered instead, saying, “The last time you surfed Waimea you got pushed under the wave. You nearly drowned.”
As though slapped by her, Sharkey sat down on the floor and held his head, seeing only a swirl of bubbles, the dimming light in the depths of the wave, a growing sense of helplessness as it darkened.
“No one knows you,” Olive said, unrelenting. “Though I know more than most people. And this man—the man you killed—all we know are the few facts of his life that anyone could find out on the Internet. A lot of them don’t fit together. Born in a kiss-me-arse town. Then the army. Then school and a business and a big speeding ticket. A ton of money. And the next thing we know is he’s riding a bike in the rain, drunk and stoned, just like you, at Waimea.”
Still holding his head, Sharkey said, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry.”
“We don’t know this man—we really don’t know anything.” She knelt and embraced Sharkey, holding his head, consoling him in a way that killed his desire yet comforted him, more like a mother than a lover. “We need to know.”
“It was an accident,” Sharkey said, moaning, his mind still on the man on the bike in the rain.
“Think of what we don’t know,” Olive said, not scolding now but spirited, with a hint of promise, as though beginning a folktale. “The missing years. Between making a fortune on the mainland and ending up homeless in Hawaii.”
“Lots of stoners come from the mainland and end up on the beach here.”
“When did he come? Where did he live? What did he do here? Who did he know? What happened to all his money?” Still holding him, she let this sink in. “Maybe he was married. If so, did he have children, and where are they, and do they know he’s dead?”
Sharkey said, “Maybe he was like me. No wife. No kids.”
“No one seems to know, or care, that he’s a box of ashes on a shelf in the mortuary in Honolulu.”
She released him then. He got to his feet, staggered a little, and bumped the table as he backed away.
“But it’s not only him. I’m worried about you. Joe, nothing has gone right since that happened.” She thought a moment, looking pained, thinking, Voodoo death. “Sometimes at the hospital a person checks in. ‘Don’t feel good.’ We run tests, we review the paperwork, we do what we can. But we know what’s going to happen. There’s this horrible shorthand expression we use. ‘He’s terminal.’”
Sharkey began to speak but thought better of it. He wandered to the lanai and sat in his usual chair, the bentwood rocker, and stared at the chickens pecking on the lawn. Olive did not join him at once. She watched him from a little distance, and it seemed to her that he was diminished—older, somewhat shrunken, the shadow on his face giving him a look of sorrow. Tattoos on such a man looked absurd, the big man reduced, the man of action in repose, very still and smaller. The impression she’d had weeks ago, that his body looked uninhabited.
She went to him, softly. He shut his eyes when she touched his shoulder.
“Think of it as a quest.”
He nodded and spoke in a whisper, as if to himself. “I know what a quest is. I used to look for big waves.”
7
Floristan
On a day of heavy traffic, on their way to the airport, they took a side road, Olive driving, Sharkey slouched in the passenger seat, his head lolling like an invalid’s. But his eyes were alert to the shanties half-hidden in the trees, the ragged tents off the bypass road, the cluster of huts aslant in the muddy valley just before the bridge at Wahiawa, the shelters of blue plastic along the bike path at Pearl City, the lean-tos and piled-up cardboard buttressed by rusted shopping carts and splintered crates under the freeway at Nimitz, and at each scattered rat’s nest of sticks and plastic, bearded men and women with greasy strings of hair, sticklike themselves, skin burned to leather, in sweaty rags, in the glare of sunshine, standing in tall grass or under shade trees. The homeless of the island.
“Those shonky huts,” Olive said.
On a hot stretch of the freeway, a shirtless man in torn shorts pushed a shopping cart piled high with rags along the gravel shoulder, a dark futile figure scowling at passing cars.
“Samuel Beckett,” Olive said.
“You know him?”
“Figure of speech. Lost soul.”
“He came here like them,” Sharkey said after a while, approaching the airport road. “From the mainland. Like them—when he had nowhere else to go.”
He seemed to speak in an accusing way to a man crouching slack-jawed on the sidewalk, his skinny arm flung around the neck of a dog with stiff dirty fur and a fat twitching tongue.
Seeing Sharkey, the man extended his arm, cupped his hand, begging. But Olive drove on.
“We don’t know that. Right?”
He grunted, an unwilling no.
“All we know is that he had a life. We owe it to him to find out what it was, and why he ended up at night on a bike in the rain and then dead in Waimea.”
“I hate going to the airport here. Every flight you take is so long. I’m not in shape to fly.”
“If we don’t do this, your life won’t be worth living. It’s awful now. Look at yourself. You don’t eat, you hardly sleep—and you don’t surf anymore.”
“You think I’m cursed,” he said, giggling mirthlessly to show he didn’t believe it.
“Wrong word.”
“What would you say?”
“No one did anything to you. The thing’s inside you.” She was glad to be driving so that she didn’t have to see his face when she spoke. “I think you’re in trouble.”
“Whatever.” He covered his eyes, masking himself, feeling nagged again.
“The worst of it is you don’t know it.”
“Arkansas,” he said. “It’s so far away.”
“You’ve flown to South Africa. To Portugal. To Indo.”
“There are waves in those places. There’s no waves in Arkansas.”
He spoke softly, keeping the words in his mouth as though he were chewing, so that what he said was a vibration rather than a clear statement. He objected to the trip but, weakened, he was docile, mildly stubborn, too slow in his m
ovements to object. It seemed to be his usual state now, ineffective, more like a child than a man.
But Olive was used to that—with Sharkey, and in her work. The sick at the hospital who raised their eyes piteously to her as she made her rounds from bed to bed—they were childlike. Fearful, helpless, haunted, they needed her to soothe them, to encourage them and make them hopeful.
Sharkey had become like them, a semi-invalid, dependent on her. And so he hated going to the airport and whispered his objections and said the homeless people by the roadside disgusted him—“Why don’t they go back where they came from?” Still, he did not have the strength to oppose her with any conviction. He followed her because he needed her.
What heartened Olive, and appalled Sharkey, was the knowledge that he would follow her anywhere now. But it was not love—it was need. He had nowhere else to go.
In the terminal, the woman checking them in held up his driver’s license and said brightly, “Joe Sharkey,” then handed him the license with his boarding pass, beaming as though presenting him with a gift.
Sharkey rallied a little at the thought that she’d recognized him; he stood straighter and managed a thin smile and snatched at his belt, pulling up his pants—his weight loss meant that his clothes bagged and flapped.
“Gate five,” the woman said, then looked past him, raising her hand. “Next in line.”
She had no idea. Sharkey said, “I hate being with all these people,” and gestured to the other travelers, jostling him. They oppressed him, he was one of them, he found them clumsy and slow, burdened by bags and cases. You left home and then you were in the world, and the world was full of people pushing past you who didn’t know who you were. And it was as though you didn’t exist.
He was muttering, on the verge of cursing out loud, when he saw a woman approaching with a wheelchair.
“Is that thing for me?”
“I asked for it,” Olive said. “We’ll get through quicker,”
Sharkey was at first confused, but he sat, and, pushed by a Filipina attendant, a young woman in a uniform, her nametag LAKAMBINI, was eased through the security zone. When their flight was called, the woman wheeled him down the jetway and tipped him through the doorway, then helped him to his seat. As Olive had hoped, he was calmer as a result; the efficiency quieted him.
