Island

by Johanna Skibsrud

  There it was—the sound again. Like a voice being stuffed back in a throat. A moan, a muffled shout—

  Before she could stop herself, Rachel’s own voice rang out. The noise almost choked her.

  Stupid!

  She could feel the blood beating in her ears and under her tongue. The kid would come running now, almost certainly. Bring his friends—wave his gun.

  A minute or more passed and nothing happened. Rachel held her breath until she almost passed out, and listened, but no sound came.

  ELEVEN

  Mr. Joshua stood watch at the gated entry to the enclave of newer homes, built on a small rise just north of the town centre, which housed the island’s foreign residents. Though not particularly luxurious by anything but island standards, the houses—with their fresh paint, big windows, and landscaped front yards—looked enormous and out of place to anyone who, like Mr. Joshua, had travelled up the hill from town.

  Lota nodded to Mr. Joshua as they sped through the gate. She felt calm now—almost like herself again: the girl who’d dressed in front of the chipped mirror that morning, who’d felt the future taking shape inside her before anything had even begun.

  It hadn’t taken them long, back at the embassy, to find what they were looking for. The boxes stacked on the middle shelves were stuffed with memos and intelligence reports dating back to the early 1990s. At the very top of the pile they’d found maps, scientific reports, and a detailed record of depth measurements between here and the two coasts. Kurtz had been pleased, to say the least, and it began to feel obvious even to Lota that—despite their mistakes—they were moving steadily toward their goal.

  The van stopped in front of a pink ranch house with a painted iron gate. Baby Jane jumped out and Lota jumped out after. She felt the gravel crunch beneath her feet as she trailed Kurtz through the busted front door into the house.

  Inside, everything was neat and bare, as if nobody had ever actually lived in the house. Lota had the eerie feeling that, if she continued toward the back, she’d find that the rear rooms gaped—that there would be no facing wall.

  They crossed the soft linoleum floor, Kurtz’s boots squishing noisily. But then the hall ended and the linoleum gave way to thick carpet. When Kurtz stepped onto the carpet and raised her gun, her boots made absolutely no sound.

  Lota was standing directly behind Kurtz and, from that position, couldn’t see what Kurtz was pointing her gun at. Because of this, she didn’t know where exactly—or at what—she should be pointing her own.

  She could have taken a step to either side, of course; there was nothing stopping her. But she just stood there instead—her pulse beating powerfully, biting at her top lip until the skin broke.

  Very slowly, Kurtz edged her way forward and, reluctantly, Lota raised her gun. She didn’t budge, though, and it was a good several seconds even after Kurtz had sufficiently moved ahead before she realized what it was she was looking at, and at whom she was pointing her gun.

  It was a woman.

  Lota’s hands began to tremble.

  And a child.

  Lota looked at Kurtz, but Kurtz was looking only steadily ahead. The woman—clearly unarmed—stared back, gripping her son. Her eyes were bloodshot and her short thin hair practically stood up on end.

  “Put the child down.” Kurtz’s voice sounded distressingly calm.

  The woman retracted an outstretched arm; Lota lowered her gun. The child—a boy of three, perhaps, four at most—began to wail.

  “I said, put the child down.”

  The woman shook her head. Her face was pale—red in patches. She didn’t speak; possibly she couldn’t.

  Lota stepped forward. It was not a decision she made but instead almost an involuntary response. Before she could stop herself she had taken a step and reached out one hand in the direction of the child.

  “Here,” she said. “Here. Let me…” She took another step and placed her other hand firmly on the muzzle of Kurtz’s gun.

  Again the woman shook her head, but a moment later, when Lota stretched both of her hands toward the child, the woman released him.

  Abruptly, the child stopped crying. He looked first at Lota and then back at his mother, clinging tightly all the while to Lota’s shoulder and the collar of her shirt.

  “Get down.” Kurtz’s voice was strained now, in a way that Lota didn’t recognize.

  The woman dropped heavily to her knees; Baby Jane swooped in. She took a piece of rope from her belt and swiftly tied the woman’s hands. The child watched, still clinging to Lota’s shirt. She could feel the way his body trusted hers—instinctively. He did not cry out.

  “We’re not here to hurt you.” Kurtz’s voice was steady again, but at the sound of it the woman began to bawl loudly.

  “Quiet!” A shrill, reflexive response, which Kurtz could not have intended. “We’ll be transferring you to town. You—and your son—will be well looked after.”

  Baby Jane hoisted the woman up and thrust her forward, in the direction they’d come. Lota followed with the child.

  “We’ll keep you in our custody,” Kurtz continued, taking up the rear, “only until further arrangements can be made.”

  They went out the front door, then down the steps to the drive. The woman’s body had gone limp; Baby Jane struggled to lift her. Finally, with Kurtz’s help, she managed to slide her into the narrow back seat of the van. Lota set the child down beside her. The woman couldn’t hold him properly, but her body curved around him. As it did so, the boy gave out a single, jagged sob.

  Lota moved to the front passenger-side door and was just about to squeeze, next to Baby Jane, inside, when Kurtz stopped her; grabbed her by the wrist. “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed. “How dare you put your hands on my gun?”

  Lota could feel Kurtz’s hot breath, the shape of the words on her skin. She looked up, surprised by the unexpected intimacy and directness of the address. She’d never been that close to Kurtz, had never seen her face like this—been able to examine its wrinkles and pores. She’d never been able to stare so long, or so frankly, into the older woman’s eyes, which appeared as distant stars; somehow, at the same time, very close and very far away.

  “Do you hear me?”

  Lota said nothing. She couldn’t tell what difference it would make if she responded or did not, so she simply stared back, mesmerized.

  Kurtz gave Lota’s wrist another violent tug. “Watch out,” she said. “You remember who gives the orders around here.” Her eyes flashed. In, out. Far, near. It was impossible to understand where the light was coming from—or how far away it was.

  They moved quickly through the other houses. The van filled. Some of the foreigners cried, like the woman from the first house. Some were angry and threatened them, but most complied easily—were almost deferential. They appeared bewildered, uncertain why things were not following their expected course and anxious to do whatever they could to get things back on track again.

  Almost all of them had soiled themselves. When Lota got out in the parking lot of the school gymnasium and opened the van door, the smell hit her like a wall. The sun was still high at that time, but the heat had changed—become heavy. It would probably rain soon. Lota tried to catch the eye of the little boy as they led the prisoners through the gymnasium doors but could not. He was clinging to his mother and did not look up.

  Dazed, Lota walked back to the van. She found Bruno there, his large body hunched, talking on his cell. Kurtz was still in the front passenger seat; Norma, Mystique, and Alien were sprawled out in back. Lota climbed in. Then Baby Jane, Killmonger, and Hannibal Lecter arrived. Bruno revved the motor. He still had the phone tucked under his double chin, though he didn’t any longer appear to be talking to anyone.

  Beside him, Kurtz sat up terrifically erect. As they drove back toward the centre of town, she seemed to physically hum.

  The clock tower and then the Birdman came into view.

  Kurtz glanced back and—brief
ly—her eyes caught Lota’s. Lota felt the pressure of her gaze and the white ghost’s words came swimming back. “A bit of a psycho…Everybody knew.”

  Bruno hit the pedal and the van lurched forward. Lota did her best to push the words aside.

  “Yes,” Kurtz said. She’d turned around again and was tapping the dash. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Lota’s stomach twisted. She leaned across Alien, toward the window. She desperately needed air.

  Surely the white ghost had been lying, she thought. Or confused. Surely he’d been thinking about someone else. He’d referred to Kurtz as Santos—probably the most common surname on the island. He could’ve been talking about practically anyone.

  “All right?” Alien said, shifting slightly. Gratefully, Lota lunged toward the window. The air felt like water on her skin. But the doubt would not leave her.

  What, after all, she wondered as she stared out the window and inhaled great gulps of warm air, did she really know about Kurtz? Everything she’d told them about herself—as well as everything she’d taught them about both the future and the past—had been based on a willing embrace of a series of fictions. She’d constructed her entire army out of stories—out of lies!

  The sun had just begun to lick at the water, to touch the tops of the waves. There were no clouds in that part of the sky and it looked as though the sun had been cut out of paper or cloth. Lota gripped the plastic cover of the seatback in front of her and leaned away from the window. Soon, she thought, the sun would begin to set slowly. It would billow slightly at the bottom as it hit the water, then quickly sink from view. Ordinarily, Lota loved to watch it go—loved to glimpse, if she could, the strange green flash across the surface of the water in the exact moment the sun disappeared below the waves—to feel the strange vertigo induced by forcing herself to think, as she often did, It is not the sun slipping, incrementally, away from me; it is me slipping incrementally away from the sun.

  But today she closed her eyes; she couldn’t look.

  “Yes,” Kurtz said again, drumming on the dash. “Yes, yes, yes.” She sat erect. Not just her body but the very air around her seemed to hum.

  The evening had begun to cool slightly. The breeze had picked up, and now—thankfully—it began to blow itself in through the van’s semi-open windows.

  Well, what was there, in the end, but stories? Lota thought. Lies? And what was any revolution, as Kurtz had said and Norma, it seemed, had always implicitly known, but necessary violence? A total break—“as though by an unbridgeable chasm”—with the past?

  Even if it was true, what the ghost had said…

  The earth had been formed by a collision of opposing elements. Romulus slew Remus, Cain slew Abel, Pele was the goddess of volcanoes and fire as well as the creator of islands, and the origin of all life: “whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime.”

  Lota gripped the seatback tighter. Yes, she thought. What was any revolution, therefore, but this? Yes, this. Despite her personal doubts and misgivings. The revolution—the future—was this. Was Kurtz drumming her hand on the dash. Was the sound of her voice as it beat out the time. Was—

  Yes! This island. This air. Was yes this water. This dirt, this van, this rutted road.

  It was a relief to breathe again. A moment ago Lota had been practically suffocating, but now, she realized, there was plenty of air. She inhaled deeply, but just as she was about to exhale, the breath snagged in her throat.

  She saw Verbal. His eyes glazed over in the moment after the shot—before his body or mind even knew what had hit him.

  Lota gagged, choking on spit and air.

  Alien shifted beside her. “All right?” he said again.

  Yes, it was Verbal’s eyes that had given in first. She’d glimpsed in them—even before the waist and then the knees buckled—what? A profound relief. Yes, that was it. The same relief she’d felt just a moment ago as she (Yes!) had given in, too, allowing—no, inviting—the past to simply slip away.

  She hadn’t suspected it. No. Until that moment, couldn’t possibly have guessed that the future into which she’d wished, so desperately, to arrive was the same future into which—

  Again she saw Verbal. He rose up, an apparition on the road. Bruno did not slow down. The van bounced, careering forward. Verbal stared, his eyes turned inward. They refused to look, refused to see the van approaching—were as powerless as Lota was to steer the vehicle in any other direction than the one in which it was already bound.

  But then, just as rapidly as it had appeared, the vision faded. There was nothing but the road, the Birdman up ahead. Graffitied and shat upon by generations of rock doves and common terns. Verbal was safe—was untouched, unmoved. At the last minute—just before the van hit—his eyes must have shifted, just as they had earlier that day. He’d plunged inward, escaping contact—intent on something beyond her, which she couldn’t understand.

  They’d almost reached the main avenue now; Bruno slowed the van to a crawl. Kurtz leaned out the window, a megaphone gripped in one hand. Even the air seemed to hold its breath.

  Then the sun hit the water and Kurtz let out a loud, long yell. The sound boomed through the megaphone and echoed out onto the empty street.

  For the first time, it occurred to Lota how odd it was to see the streets so deserted. Usually, at this time of day, people had begun to creep out of their houses again, to sit on their front steps, or the benches outside Josie’s canteen, to smoke and tell stories, or simply to sit in silence and watch the sun go down.

  But no one was out on their front steps today. No old-timers sat nodding on the benches outside Josie’s—as though in agreement with something no one had actually heard. No kids threw balls against the wall of the credit union building or chased each other around the broken fountain or the National Assembly’s concrete steps.

  Only Kurtz’s voice could be heard. As though it was just a voice—disconnected even from the idea of human beings.

  It was impossible to say how long the yell lasted. Although it seemed like hours, even days, from the time it began to the time that it ended, the van travelled only a few hundred feet: from where the parking lot next to the National Assembly building emptied out onto the main road to the big shade tree outside Josie’s canteen.

  At some point during that stretch—of distance or of time—and without Lota’s having witnessed it, the sun had disappeared below the line of the horizon. The streets had immediately been plunged into shadow.

  Just as Lota was noticing this, Kurtz lifted the megaphone again and began to speak into the descending darkness. She spoke slowly this time, in discrete syllables, but somehow this did not make the voice seem any more human—or what she said any easier to understand.

  “For-ty-three years of des-pot-ism and corruption,” the voice said. “Of put-ting for-eign int-er-ests a-head of our own.” It was as if the voice wished to communicate the syllables themselves—and not the words, or their possible meanings. “This time is now at an end. A new e-ra is born.”

  The syllables bounced down the empty street, then disappeared, splintering through the leaves of the lead trees.

  Norma, clutching a second megaphone and leaning out a rear window, repeated the words. Then she handed the megaphone to Mr. Joshua, beside her, who repeated the words a third time.

  Still, no life stirred in the streets. No one emerged from the houses. No one made their way to the Assembly steps or pulled up a chair outside Josie’s canteen or stood gaping at them from the side of the road.

  “We can as-sure you,” Kurtz called out. “Voll-man and his fam-il-y are quite safe. I re-peat: their safety and se-cur-it-y—like your own—is guar-an-teed.”

  Perhaps everyone, Lota mused, had followed the sun to the edge of the water—had walked out to that limit, then past it, been suddenly drowned. Or perhaps no one had ever lived on the island at all. Perhaps Lota had dreamed
it all up, and Kurtz was announcing the liberation of an island that had never existed, a people that had never been born.

  Kurtz’s voice again. “We pro-mise to ensure,” she said, “that basic hu-man rights and freedoms will be recog-nized. That law and order will be rein-stat-ed. That democra-cy will prevail!”

  The syllables came close, this time, to making an actual impression on the air. Norma repeated them, then Mr. Joshua.

  Then Kurtz again. “Re-joice.”

  Just as before, the word sounded at first only like two distinct syllables, but then Kurtz repeated it. “Re-joice,” she said. “Let the is-land re-joice”—until slowly, the syllables became words, and the words took on meaning.

  As they did so, the people began to emerge. Singly, at first. Then in groups of three or four. They stood out in their small yards—stared wide-eyed as though at the wreckage after a storm.

  But nothing had been ruined. No leaf had been shaken—no stone dislodged or overturned. Except for the brief wind that had blown in from the water just before the sun went down, the air had hardly stirred all day. No, there was nothing at all to indicate that anything had changed. People stood on their doorsteps, on the side of the road, in the middle of the street, and looked around and were surprised because everything was different, and yet nothing had changed. They looked at the dirt on the street, at the broken fountain, the concrete steps, the leaning branches of the lead trees.

  “Re-joice!” the voice rang.

  The islanders stumbled from their homes. They gazed around and saw—briefly, and all together—that everything that existed in that moment existed only as it had always existed.

  “Rejoice!”

  They saw that even what hadn’t yet happened, or wasn’t yet real, would exist like that, too: as it already was.

  But then something shifted. Instead of one shared feeling, there were many. People began to see the world and what was happening in it as they had before: from their own distinct, and limited, and therefore often conflicting angles. As this happened, the looks on people’s faces turned variously to anger, confusion, excitement, or disbelief.