Inexpressible Island

by Paullina Simons

  In June, he was still at Hampstead Heath. He thought he was getting better, ready to leave maybe, but one afternoon when he was out in the garden, he fell as if cut down and couldn’t get up. An X-ray showed he had fractured his pelvis. No one could figure out why. He didn’t trip, hadn’t been pushed, hadn’t been blasted out of his seat by a sonic wave of a nearby bomb. The bone just crumbled.

  “We see this injury in very old people,” the flummoxed doctor said. “Their bones disintegrate. I’ve never seen it in a young man like yourself.”

  Julian wanted to tell the doc he wasn’t so young.

  He received a hip replacement, like many of the old folks in the home. Painful rehab took him through August.

  Now when he walked he walked with a cane.

  Devi visited both Julian and Ava.

  Julian didn’t speak to him. He had nothing to say.

  And then, one September night, when the moon was new, he dreamed of Josephine again. The golden awning was above him, the metal table stood on the familiar sidewalk. The umbrella swung side to side in her hands. The red beret was on her head.

  He screamed when he woke up. He thrashed in his bed. No, he begged. No.

  But she was smiling! Smiling, strolling down the street with a spring in her step, as if everything was never better.

  The devil was mocking Julian. Now he knew: ridicule is what he’d been given in exchange for his soul. Julian could hear the diabolical cackle all the way from the underworld.

  After dreaming of her, he decided to leave Hampstead Heath. But he couldn’t leave without talking to Ava first.

  “Ava,” he said, pulling up a chair by the window where she sat. “Look at me, please. Blink if you can hear me. I need to ask you something. Years ago in L.A., Josephine—I mean Mia—told me you couldn’t make it to our wedding because you were out of the country visiting relatives. I know that was a lie, but what she said was: you were visiting relatives in Morecambe Bay.”

  Ava nodded. The stroke had ruined her speech and disabled her ability to write or spell or remember the order of words, but she could still understand. The doctors thought she might get better with time, but she wasn’t better yet.

  “Is that where your family is from?”

  Ava nodded.

  Silently Julian watched her. “What about a pink house on Babbacombe Road in Blackpool? Do you know it?”

  With a baffled frown, she shook her head.

  “A woman named Abigail Delacourt lived in that house. Did you ever hear of her? Or her sister Wilma?”

  Grabbing his hand, Ava tried to form words, first with her mouth and then on a legal pad. Julian couldn’t make sense of her markings. For a long while she drew nothing but manic circles.

  Julian wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “Who was Abigail?” he said.

  Vehemently she shook her head.

  “Who was Wilma?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you write and tell me? Who was she?”

  On a fresh sheet of paper, with her weak left hand, Ava slowly scratched out a stick figure. It was an O with two criss-crossing lines underneath it, forming a t. She drew another figure and below that a third. With a pencil she kept tapping at the third stick figure, tapping so hard she made a hole in the paper.

  It was a game of Pictionary between a woman who couldn’t draw and a man dense like a wood plank.

  On a new sheet of paper, Ava drew the three stick figures again, this time in a vertical line, one above the other, and then a connecting line from the bottom figure to the middle and from the middle figure to the top. She tapped the top figure with her finger.

  “The top one is Wilma?”

  Fervently Ava nodded. She tapped the bottom stick figure and then herself on the chest.

  Julian opened his mouth. “Wilma is your grandmother?”

  Ava cried.

  He sat stunned. “Wilma had three daughters,” he said in a disbelieving voice. “Which one was your mother?”

  Ava lowered her hand below the arm of the chair.

  “The youngest? Kara?”

  Ava nodded.

  Julian took Ava’s frail hand. “Kara was your mother? Oh, Ava. What year were you born? I can’t believe I don’t know this.”

  Through headshakes and nods, he learned that the year was 1945.

  “Ava, what did you know about your great aunt Abigail? She had a daughter named Maria. She was your mother’s cousin. She died five years before you were born.”

  Pressing an arthritic fist deep into her heart, Ava’s eyes glistened with anguish.

  “Ava,” Julian whispered, “did you name your daughter Mia after Abigail’s daughter?”

  Her eyes spilling over, Ava nodded.

  “How did you and your family get from Morecambe Bay to Brooklyn?” Julian asked.

  Ava found the first scrap of paper she had drawn on. Holding the index finger of Julian’s maimed hand, she guided him over the series of circles, one after the other. With his pointer, she tapped on one, then the next, and the next. Julian stared at the circles, at Ava, outside into the garden. He counted the circles, but it was unnecessary. He knew the answer already.

  36.

  Thirty-six Fabian coins he had left with Mia in the pink house on Babbacombe Road.

  29

  Junk Shop

  THE DOORBELL RANG OVERHEAD AS JULIAN OPENED Quatrang’s door. Devi came out from the back, wiping his hands. “Look who’s finally here,” he said. “Would you like some lunch?”

  “No,” Julian said. “I’m not staying. I came to ask you a question.”

  Devi put down the dishtowel and stood small and straight by the counter.

  “Are you telling me the truth?” Julian said. “Is there really no way to go back?”

  “There is really no way to go back.”

  “Then why did I dream of her again?”

  “I don’t know,” Devi said. “Grief?”

  “No.”

  “Take a walk around London, Julian.”

  “I would but—” Julian waved his umbrella that doubled as a walking stick.

  “You should’ve been more attentive when it was easier,” Devi said. “You’ve been walking, but you haven’t seen. Otherwise you might’ve learned something.”

  “Do I look to you as if I haven’t learned enough?”

  “Every soul out there is dreaming and searching for something they loved and lost,” Devi said. “Every one of them is seeking the unattainable thing. On the streets of London is the answer to why you dream. It’s the human condition. Watch the men and women when they’re by themselves. They’re all searching. For faded beauty, for old love, for a new career, for warmer climes, for health, for their dead mothers. For their lost s-sons.” Devi’s voice almost didn’t stammer. “We’re all like you.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  “Of course not. You refuse to get it. Everyone sees the faces they love in their dreams!” Devi rocked backward, unsteady on his feet. “But you had the real thing. You had it. I told you what it would cost you. And now you’re upset you had to pay the price? Looking for another miracle, are you? Well, I’m all out, Julian.”

  “You call what you gave me a miracle?” Julian said through his teeth.

  “Oh, you ingrate,” the Hmong cook said, his own teeth clenched. “Do you know what I would give to see my son again?” Devi’s stiff hands gripped the counter. “Everything. I would give everything I had, everything I would ever have, every single thing under the sun, and everything else in the universe. Ashton was right about me. If the devil had asked me for your soul in return for my boy, I would’ve betrayed you like that.” Devi snapped his fingers. “I would’ve handed you over.”

  “You did hand me over.”

  “Then I was duped because I got nothing in return.”

  Julian’s heart was black as it flew over emptiness.

  Nothing was stronger than death.

  Not even him.

 
; Not even her.

  And while he was busy feeling sorry for himself, time carried the marrow of his life away.

  He was quiet. Great Eastern Road was quiet.

  “You destroyed my life,” Julian said. “Yes, I was a husk before I met you, but you ruined me for good.” His shoulders quaked. Without saying another word, he turned around, took his umbrella, and limped out of Quatrang, the doorbell ringing behind him.

  Devi followed Julian down the street.

  “Julian, please come back. Let me help you.”

  “You can’t help me. You said so yourself.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere. You’ve made sure of that.”

  “You’re not being fair. You have been too long with your pain, and it has brought corruption to your life. Come back. Let me heal you.”

  “No. You’re all out. And I’m out, too. As Kiritopa told me, I’m bowed in the middle where everything that gave me life used to be.” Julian continued down the street, leaning on his umbrella. “Soon I’ll fall to the ground.”

  “Please, Julian.”

  “Leave me alone, Devi.” Let me fall.

  Julian ended the lease on his Notting Hill apartment and sold or gave away most of his things. He kept a few clothes, a photo of him and Ashton, the Bob Marley poster, Josephine’s books, his old multi-tool, his journals, and the loose, chipped-off shards of what was left of Mia’s crystal in a small glass jar. Basically he took what was on top of his nightstand. The 37th gold coin that he had brought back with him years earlier from the Great Fire he returned to Ava. She shook her head, but he insisted. It was never his to begin with.

  He turned off his cell service, threw away his phone, and left no forwarding mailing address. He moved to Greenwich, where he found a room for rent above the Junk Shop on the High Road, a full circle from Mrs. Pallaver’s on Hermit Street all those years ago, another tiny space with a twin bed.

  Every single day without fail from October to the end of February, Julian had lunch at the Rose and Crown, where the barkeep would ask him what he was having today, and then hobbled through the park up the steep hill to the Royal Observatory and stood at the black Transit Circle with the crystal shards in his palm, waiting for the midday sun to give him a sign.

  Every day Julian waited for the portal below to open to him again.

  And every day it did not, as if it had never opened, as if it didn’t exist.

  30

  The One-Eyed King

  IN EARLY MARCH, THERE WAS A KNOCK ON HIS DOOR.

  It was Mark, the owner of the Junk Shop.

  “Someone’s here to see you,” Mark said.

  Devi stood on the landing.

  Julian didn’t tell him to come in. He came in anyway. “How did you find me?”

  “How difficult do you think it was? Were you hiding? How do you think you found this place? You don’t remember I told you my good friend Mark sold all kinds of junk out of his yard?”

  “No.”

  They stood.

  “How have you been?”

  “Great.”

  “You know who I keep seeing in church almost every Sunday?” Devi said. “Ashton’s father. He comes, brings flowers to the graveyard. Brings lots of flowers. Almost looks like two bouquets.”

  “Did you come to tell me about Ashton’s father’s weekend schedule?” Julian said. “What do you want?”

  “What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “What do you care?” Julian grabbed his keys, his umbrella, the jar of her crystal pieces, the signed playbill from The Invention of Love, the books she had held in her hands, and pushed past Devi.

  The cook followed him down the stairs and to the street. “You haven’t been to the gym. Franco and Ricks are upset.”

  “They’ll manage.”

  “Why haven’t you gone back?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  Julian had been going to a gym in Greenwich, but he’d be damned before he told Devi that. He turned off the High Road to the Royal Park, trying to be brisk about it. Devi was surprisingly spry. Or was it Julian who was surprisingly slow? Nowadays he struggled to walk without limping, and he could no longer sustain the feats of endurance that used to cast him for miles around London. He still looked for the café with the golden awning, but only in Greenwich, and sometimes he looked for it in Sydenham, where Mirabelle used to live, but he stopped his excursions across the river.

  “Please don’t make me walk up the hill to the Observatory with you,” Devi said.

  “I’m literally trying to get away from you. You going with me is the last thing I want.”

  “Slow down. Let’s have a drink first, let’s talk.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Julian, please.”

  Even a hobbled Julian managed to leave the elderly Hmong man behind.

  Devi found him inside the Transit Room, standing in front of the telescope, palm out, shards in his hands. “Julian.” Devi was panting. He held on to the black railing to steady himself. He wouldn’t look at the deep dark well at the foot of the telescope—as if he was afraid it would swallow him if he so much as glanced at it. “Explain to me what you’re doing.”

  Julian didn’t reply. He glanced at his watch. It was only 11:30. He couldn’t take another half hour of this.

  “It won’t open,” Devi said.

  “Maybe it won’t. And maybe it will. Maybe it opens every new moon, or every full moon. Or randomly. Or on every other solstice or every other equinox, or on the first and last day of every month, or only on the 29th of February. Maybe it opens when someone wishes it real hard. You have no idea. But one of these days, it will open,” Julian said. “And I will be here when it does.”

  “Okay, say it does. Then what?”

  Julian whirled to Devi. He knew he must have looked manic, palsied, desperate and enslaved, but he didn’t care. “It took me eight years to understand a central fact of my life,” Julian said. “I have been lost, reformed, made smaller, weaker, sicker. In some ways larger, yes, but not the important ways. For many years I lived with no comprehension of the most vital thing open to me, yet with a total indifference to everything else that mattered. The more filled with mystery my life became, the more frantic I grew, and the more determined to fail at everything else, as long as I succeeded in my one imperative—to save her. In other words, to do the one thing that I could not do, that made the least sense, yet somehow was the sanest thing in my life.”

  “You’re upset with me—”

  “Oh, we’re way past that. I’m furious. With myself, too, for allowing you to do this to me. I’ve been pissed off for years. Silly me, I thought if I did everything right, if I lived right and leaped by faith and learned to fence and fight, to ride horses, to plant, to make candles and love, to write her poetry and keep evil men away from her, that it wouldn’t all be a pantomime, it wouldn’t all be the dumbest fucking dumbshow on this earth. The idiot that I was,” Julian said through gritted teeth, “I thought that through the sheer immovable force of my effort and hope, I’d pull off the impossible and make her possible, that I would change her fate and give her back her life, the life she had never finished living, the life she had barely begun to live when we met.”

  “How can you give her back what you didn’t give her in the first place?” Devi asked quietly.

  “Because I’d been given a miracle! You said so yourself! I’d been given a second chance, and I refused to believe it was for nothing. And here’s the thing,” Julian said, leaning forward. “I still refuse to believe it.”

  “Yes, you’re the master of not facing facts.” Devi waited. “But now what? All these self-discoveries, encouraging though they are, don’t explain what you’re doing here.”

  “I’ve been looking at everything all wrong, thanks to you.”

  “I knew it had to be my fault somehow.”

  “The Dream Machine said outlook hazy. Try again. So that’s what I’m
doing.”

  “What is this Dream Machine?”

  “A large roulette wheel on a boardwalk that spins and tells you things.”

  “So a Magic 8-Ball?” Devi said. “You’re making your life decisions based on a plastic cube inside some water? Do you think perhaps this holy oracle had simply meant spin again?”

  “No,” Julian said. “And you know who told me that? You. When you quoted C.S. Lewis to me. Very often what God helps us toward is just this power of trying again, you said.”

  “So now the Almighty is communicating with you through an amusement park fortune wheel?”

  “It said try again. I will find a way.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? You’re afraid that the portal will open. Once again, you’re trying to talk me out of it.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  Julian glanced at his watch. “Stop talking. It’s almost noon.”

  “So what?”

  “Be quiet! I need to focus.”

  Noon came.

  Noon went.

  Nothing happened.

  Julian lowered his hand with the crystal chips that looked a lot like glass shards in the blown-apart jeep in wartime London. Carefully he returned the slivers into the jar and tightened the lid.

  “Are you done?” Devi said.

  “Until tomorrow.”

  “Julian . . .”

  Julian stormed off.

  Devi hurried down the hill behind him, all the way to the High Road. “I’m going back to Quatrang,” he called out. “Are you sure you don’t want to come for lunch? Now would be a good time.”

  Julian didn’t reply, walking away as fast as his fake hip and fake knee could carry him.

  * * *

  A week later on March 15, Julian spent his birthday utterly alone, almost as if he hadn’t turned forty.

  Five days later, on the March equinox, Devi was back at Mark’s.

  “Come to say goodbye?” Julian said.

  “Why, where are you going?” Devi said.

  Julian clearly thought he was going somewhere. He was more prepared than he’d been the past few times. Weaker, but more prepared. He was bringing a headlamp, extra bulbs, another two flashlights, hooks, a knife, weatherproof gloves. Under his clothes, he had donned a wetsuit again. He had placed her books in sealed plastic bags to keep them from getting wet. He brought a chest pack. He brought everything he could think of.