by Lavie Tidhar
I try not to think about the white caps too much.
The men beach the canoes and haul out their catches. Pulan Robert smiles at me and waves over to where Kami waits with our youngest daughter bouncing on her hip. A moment later his smile dims. Our visitors have arrived. Four men, tall and lean, with walking sticks wrapped in copper wire and the green ribbons of Agat village.
Rai stops beside me and frowns. “They’re late.”
“They’re on time.”
“Late,” he insists. “They’ll slow us down tomorrow.”
“Two days to get there,” I tell him. “Then you’ll see Angelina again.”
At sunset our entire village dines on roasted fruit bats, fresh rabbit fish, breadfruit, cakes, and tuba. The musicians play nose flutes and drums for the children dancing around the bonfire. Three of the men from Agat know of me, but the fourth keeps sliding glances my way. Beneath my blouse, my bra is stuffed with soft grass. I wear a wig of long hair, dark and straight.
“Babae?” he asks his companions in Tagalog. Many Filipinos clustered in Agat in the After Silence.
“Oo,” his friends say.
He wants to know if I’m a girl. Yes, they say. But he looks at me doubtfully. Wondering what’s under my skirt, maybe wondering if he can put his hands under there to squeeze and rub.
Pulan Robert puts his arm around my shoulder. He smells like salt and fish and Kami.
“You should stay here,” he says that night, in our bed, as we stare up at the tin and thatch ceiling. Kami’s hut is bigger, but mine is closer to the cooling ocean breeze. Mosquitoes nibble on our arms.
“I have to go. Someone has to remember the dead,” I remind him.
“I’ll come along and keep you company.”
“Rai is coming.”
“Rai is too impatient. He won’t pay attention.”
I kiss his nose. “Rai will always pay attention to me.”
Rai’s impatient because it’s been six months since he’s held his wife in his arms. In the morning, he’s awake before anyone else. At breakfast, somber Irao speaks quietly to his crying children. The fourth from our village is Husto, who has spent the last week pleading to our little governor that he should be excused from this duty. She stands firm. The lottery is fair and the gods have picked him to take his turn digging. I wonder if we’re going to have to physically lift Husto in the air and carry him away, but finally he pries himself away from his weeping mother.
“Travel safely,” Pulan Robert says, with a final warm kiss.
“I will,” I promise.
The men from Agat lead the way down the road. We follow, and only Husto looks back.
Despite the solemn occasion, I like these trips. Before Silence, you could drive all over Guahan on asphalt roads, from the turquoise waters of Cocos Lagoon all the way north to the limestone cliffs at Ritidian Point. The shrine for the Japanese soldiers who killed themselves, the international airport for big jets, the army tanks abandoned after the war—you could visit them all in just one day. Now the roads are all rubble, and bandits control the bridges, and some of the white villages up north won’t let you pass over their lands without payment. Rai and I tried rowing around the island once when we were young. We nearly shredded ourselves on the reefs. Ours is the age of footpaths and walking sticks, and many people die without ever having stepped outside the villages they were born in.
The coastal route to Layon is pretty enough, but I’d like to see more of the old military bases. My namesake Joseph Howard USN worked on one of those. The concrete shells of the buildings are all gutted and stripped out, the roofs blown away by typhoons or leveled by earthquakes. Those ruins are less sad, somehow, than the iron skeletons of hotel high-rises in Hagatna, the resorts where the tourists honeymooned and gambled away their fortunes until the Night of Fire.
Imagine it: two hundred thousand people drinking or dreaming or fucking or hunched over military equipment in the middle of the night, in the middle of the endless ocean, and in the gap from one minute to the next, all the technology died. No telephones, radios, satellites, computers. All the power stations erupted into fire. All the transformers and electrical wires sizzled and fried themselves into charred metal. In the skies above, enormous waves of green light shimmered against the moon and stars. The governors gave me just enough science to know what the Northern Lights are, and why they should never be seen this close to the equator.
I rub my head, remember the tight white caps, and keep walking.
* * *
Our first step is Fort Nuestra, high on the bluff, to make our offers to the Lady. She’s not the oldest of our gods, but she’s the one Magellan and the Spanish gave to us while they burned our huts and killed our chiefs. When I was very small, I would pray to the Lady to take away my cock. She never did. I don’t hold it against her, though, not much anyways, because Pulan Robert likes it well enough in the dark.
After praying and leaving gifts we continue on to Merizo. Only a few families are left to greet us. Merizo went to war with Inarajan last year and came out on the poorer end. The fight was supposedly over the ownership of a prized carabao, but was probably about skin color or religion. For now Merizo only has one worker to send to the landfill, a teenage boy with a topknot dangling from his otherwise bare skull.
“I’m going to dig up a radio and battery,” he tells me as we drink tuba by the ruins of a church. “I’m going to call Jesus Christ.”
Merizo’s always been known for this kind of talk. I don’t mind it. Husto, though, announces that Jesus Christ died on the Night of Fire, and this makes the boy’s parents angry. While they argue, I walk away to piss. A woman with limestone white hair follows me. Her left leg drags in the dirt.
“You’re the ’idge,” she says, the words slurred.
Her name is Nena and she should be dead now, or so the story goes. While working at the landfill she was accidentally buried by the shifting, stinking debris. By the time they pulled her out, she’d been breathing bad air for too long. A quick death might have been more merciful, but Nena’s father carried his only child back to Merizo and cared for her until he died in the war.
“I’m Isa,” I tell her, pulling down my skirt.
“I ’ound the ’eet,” she says.
I shake my head, not understanding.
She waves her good hand toward the ocean. “The ’eet.”
Fleet. She found the Fleet. She wouldn’t be the first. Usually, though, there’s a lot of tuba involved, or smoked weeds, or the fanciful imagination of children.
“I don’t see any ships, Nena.”
“’ailor,” she says, and gestures toward the jungle.
“Show me.”
Chickens scatter before our feet on a narrow path. From the vines and bushes peek out old cement houses on cracked foundations. One hut without doors or a roof is so overgrown you’d miss it if you weren’t looking closely. Inside sits a white man, his face ghastly with pain and his eyes half-lidded. He smells like shit and urine. In his right hand is a sharp curved knife.
“The ’eet,” Nena repeats.
The rips in his clothing and long scrapes on his arms say he washed in over the reef, but any fool fisherman from the north can fall over the side of a boat. I kneel in the doorway.
“Good day, sir,” I say. “Can you tell me your name? Your village?”
He struggles to focus. Twitches the knife, as if trying to raise his arm. He starts to ramble—short, disconnected words, none of them in English or Chamorro or Tagalog.
But I know these words. The governors gave me nations and languages before they gave me names to carry. This man is speaking Russian.
My throat goes tight.
To Nena, I say, “He comes from Yona. They speak strange up there. Nothing more than that.”
Her expression falls. “Not ’eet?”
“Not Fleet, no,” I say confidently. “When the Fleet returns, an armada of ships will sail into the bay bearing food and wine. They’ll set
off fireworks and play the United States anthem. This is just a lost fisherman who needs our help. Return to the beach and find my brother Rai. He’s the tallest, the most handsome. Bring him here. But don’t let anyone else see you. They’ll claim the reward his village has for him.”
A new light gleams in her eyes at the mention of reward, and she hurries off.
If Nena had bothered to examine the Russian’s clothes, she would have seen that even stiff with sea salt, the fabric is newer and finer than anything we can weave or dig up here. He’s wearing lightweight boots with fresh rubber soles. For a white man he’s pale—a sailor who doesn’t see much sun. Maybe he came from a submarine. The governors showed us pictures of those.
“Who are you?” I ask in Russian.
His rambling stops. A hairy brown spider crawls down his leg. He doesn’t brush it off.
“Did you come alone? Can I call someone for help?”
“Sergei,” he murmurs.
Maybe that’s his name, maybe someone else’s. Before I can ask his head slumps over and the knife tumbles from his lax fingers. I see dark blood on the back of his skull. There’s a swelling there, a stone-like bump. No other major injuries on him, no jewelry or electronics, only the knife and its leather sheath strapped under his left trouser leg.
He may not have much time left, or he could recover enough to cause serious damage.
As always, I am sworn to uphold Rule Number One.
I squeeze his nose shut and clap my hand over his mouth.
* * *
Life is a stubborn habit to break. It’s a sacred thing, to watch the spirit struggle to take flight. You can see it in the flopping fish pulled from the sea, or in the panicking pig as the knife pierces its throat. The Russian makes muffled sounds and jerks his head, but has no strength to fight me off. I pray to the gods and governors for him. No one here will mourn his death with a nine-day feast. But most living things deserve kindness in their last moments, to hear words ushering them to arms of their ancestors.
When she returns with Rai, Nena’s eyes turn accusatory.
“He passed quietly, without pain,” I say. “His people from Yona will want to come and retrieve his bones. Rai, bury him in a shallow grave. But don’t tell anyone, or let them help, or they’ll want the reward, too.”
Rai balks. “What reward?”
I squeeze his arm. “The people of Yona will be grateful to know what happened to him.”
He opens his mouth, maybe to say the people of Yona are nothing but swindlers and drunkards. My fingers dig deeper into his skin. He’s not an idiot, my brother, so he goes silent. Nena, bent over the naked corpse, sniffs in grief.
“’is clothes,” she says.
“I took them for his people,” I tell her. “His last words were to thank you, Nena. His spirit rests in peace because of your kindness. He asked that you seclude yourself and say rosaries for him. If you don’t, his taotaomo’na will be very angry. Will you do it?”
She nods emphatically. “Yes.”
Back at the church, the others want to know where Rai is. “Too much feasting last night,” I lie, and they sympathize. Everyone here has suffered from the squats before.
Husto gestures to the folded fern leaves in my arms. “What’s that?”
“A gift for the taotaomo’na,” I warn him. “Don’t touch.”
We bid farewell to Merizo and detour into the valley to visit both Tinta and Faha Caves. I worry that Nena won’t do as told. Or that Rai will discover something incriminating that I left behind. But the caves require my full concentration. Back in World War II, the Japanese soldiers spent years raping the women, killing old and young alike, forcing people from their homes to concentration camps. Here, as the end of the war drew near, they herded villagers into caves and tossed grenades in after them. Other victims were tied up and beheaded and left in the dirt.
I don’t have their names—no Bridge does—but we know that the Japanese brutality made the people of Merizo rise up in rebellion. We honor them, too, in this sacred place heavy with memory.
“You tell the story well,” Irao comments, afterward.
“I wish I didn’t have to tell it at all,” I reply.
After the ceremonies we trek back to the coast, where dark gray clouds are rolling in from the south. We make it to Achang Bay before the rain starts. The only shelter is an old fueling station with two walls and a sand floor. Irao and Husto sit to one side of me, and on the other sits the man from Agat who doesn’t believe I’m a woman.
“The gods don’t want us to go to Layon,” Husto says as water pelts down.
“You whine like a child,” Irao tells him.
The man from Agat looks like he’s thinking of putting his hand on my thigh. I slide my fingers along the sheath of my knife, and he decides to stare at the rain instead.
By dusk the weather is clear but it’s too late to continue on. The men look for wood dry enough to burn while I worry about Rai. It doesn’t take that long to dig a shallow grave, and the detour to Tinta and Faha cost us time.
Irao knows me well. “He’ll be along soon.”
“Hmm,” I say.
Eventually the men build a fire, and we eat supper quietly, and afterward they smoke and drink more tuba. Rai does not come. We all stretch out under the dark, starry sky and rising full moon. I’m halfway through the first thousand names in my head when from the jungle arises a long, low, awful moan of pain. Someone—or something—in agony, in torment.
We all sit up in fear.
“It’s a pig,” says one of the men from Amat.
“It’s Anufat,” says Husto, naming the ugliest and meanest of the taotaomo’na. Anufat has fangs and claws, and sometimes not even a head.
Irao tosses sand at Husto. “Stop telling stories.”
“He wants his gift,” Husto insists, pointing to the fern leaves I’d forbidden anyone to touch. “You said it was for him.”
“It’s for another,” I protest.
The moan again: drawn out agony that makes my stomach flutter. Not Rai, I tell myself. But that fear grabs me and doesn’t let go, and after the third terrible time, I stand up.
“I’ll come with you,” Irao offers.
“No. I’ll go alone.” I pick up the folded leaves. “Stoke the fire and stay here.”
By the time I reach the edge of the jungle the fire is bright again, the men nothing but silhouettes. A narrow path, mostly overgrown, curves from behind the fueling station into the nunu trees. Brown snakes curl away from my bare feet. The knife in my hand won’t do anything against a spirit, but I have salt, too, and words, and if I have to run I can run, too, faster than anyone can imagine.
The steady sea breeze shifts the trees and leaves, makes shadows flicker, tricks my eyes with movement—and then a hand clamps down over my mouth, yanks me backward. The dead man’s clothes and knife spill from their leafy envelope and scatter on the ground. My knife gets lost in the bushes. Someone speaks low against my ear, a command of some kind. I stop struggling.
“Who are you?” I ask in Russian, muffled, garbled.
He repeats his command. Be quiet, he’s saying. He pulls me backward through brush into a small clearing where Rai is curled up on the ground, his hands and ankles bound, his mouth gagged.
“I’m a friend,” I insist, the words mostly unintelligble. “Friend.”
His free hand gropes my hips and ass. Looking for a weapon. He finds my cock instead and makes a startled noise. A moment later he yanks me down to the ground against Rai and lays a sharp blade against my exposed throat. My skin stings. Rai grunts. The moonlight illuminates the stranger’s pale face but I can’t see his eyes, or what emotion might be in them.
“Who are you?” he demands in Russian.
“Isa.”
He yanks at my wig, rips at my skirt. My cock hangs out, long and soft. He slaps at it and says, “Not a woman.”
If I had my knife, I’d cut his hand off. Instead I keep my chin up and stare straight at
him. “Sergei?”
He hesitates. The slightest flick of his wrist and he can end my life. I’m breathing fast and my insides are watery. Some things you can’t control.
“That’s the last thing he said,” I tell him. “Sergei.”
Another long moment. Then, “How did he die?”
“From his head injury. He said you might come, that you’d tell us everything. Not that you’d attack and try to kill us.”
The Russian sits back on his haunches. Rai grunts against his gag. Carefully I put my hand on his leg. He can’t understand what we’re saying. He thinks that we’re only a few moments from death, and I wouldn’t call him wrong.
“You’re Sergei?” I repeat.
“Yes. He was Vasilly.”
“You’re from Russia?”
“There’s no Russia.” His voice is flat.
“You’re the first visitors from the outside world in a hundred years,” I say, and the thrill of it runs through me. No other Bridge has ever found a man from away. The governors will be happy with me. Maybe I can finagle a reward; fewer workers to the dump each season, perhaps, or some other special favor.
Sergei points his finger and says, “Don’t move.”
He retreats to search through Vasilly’s scattered clothing and boots. In the darkness I tug on Rai’s knots, but my fingers are trembling and the cords are wound too well.
Sergei returns with Vasilly’s knife. He unscrews the base of the hollow grip. Inside are blue fireflies. Electric lights. I haven’t seen those in a long time. The weapon is some kind of tracking or communication device, designed for stealth. He slides out a narrow part and wedges free a luminescent strip. Quick, efficient moves.
“We’ve hoped for your return,” I say, trying to sound awed. “Prayed for it.”
Sergei pockets the strip. “Forget prayers. We’re only here for information.”
“Honored visitor, our governors would be happy to share anything we know.”
