by Abby Geni
Names have power. I have always believed this. I’ve never known an Anne who wasn’t docile and mild. A Karen is usually sensible, trustworthy—whereas a Shane is bad news. And a woman named Melissa is always a little crazy.
Evidently, I am doomed to be a crazy woman here. The others still call me Melissa. I have not yet found the right moment to fix the misunderstanding. At first it seemed impolite, and when a few more days had passed, I felt as though I’d waited too long, and now it would be hard to admit that for two weeks I have been responding to a name that isn’t mine. Mick usually calls me Mel, which I rather like. Lucy calls me mouse girl. Galen calls me you. Forest calls me nothing. Andrew calls me Melissa, with a sibilant hiss, the way a snake might say it.
An interesting virtue of all the traveling I have done is the possibility of adopting new identities among new people. This has happened without fail in each location. During my time in the rainforest—always wet, always hot, crouching in a blind for days in an attempt to get a decent shot of the elusive birds of paradise—I pretended to be hardy and easygoing. During my time in the arctic—always cold, always lonely, photographing the northern lights in a kind of hallucinatory daze, treating the moon like an old friend—I pretended to be solitary and serene. On the islands, it seems I have taken this process one step further.
“I’m talking about the ghost,” Mick said. “Pay attention. This is important.”
Meekly, I obeyed. We leaned together against the railing, the wind tugging my collar open and fingering my hair.
“People have died on the islands before,” Mick said. “Lots of people.”
I swallowed hard. “I know. The Islands of the Dead.”
“A long time ago, the place wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t a marine sanctuary. There were no biologists.”
“I know that too,” I said. I had, after all, done my research.
Mick went on: “Back then, everyone wanted to see what value they could find here. Fur traders hunted the animals. Sailors set up base camp. Gold miners dug up the ground.” His expression darkened. “It went on for decades. Pirates. Eggers. Russians. Nobody cared about the sharks or the seals. They just wanted to make some dough.”
I tried to visualize the scene. Staring down at the grassy plateau, I imagined it filled with figures. It was hard to grasp the idea of the islands overrun by strangers. Even I, a nature photographer, armed with nothing more harmful than a camera, had almost been denied access. These days, the place was well protected. It sat under the umbrella of government authority. The land, the sea, and especially the animals were treated as precious, finite resources. Hunting was unheard-of. Littering was not to be considered. Intruders could be thrown in jail. Even the whale-watching tours that motored in from California were required to maintain a considerable distance. It was an ecosystem left on its own—sheltered, unrefined, and unchanged.
The wind picked up, scouring my skin. I shivered, but Mick seemed unperturbed.
“Nobody stayed for long,” he said. “The islands were just too dangerous. People broke bones, got hypothermia, drowned. People were eaten by sharks. No one could stick it out.” He shook his head. “One group would hightail it out of here, running for their lives. And then some other group would move in. Set up camp. Hunt some animals. Act like idiots. Always the same. The storms would blow in soon enough. People would start dying. A few months later, they’d bolt, too.”
In short, I thought with a surge of vicarious pride, the islands had defeated them, one and all. The marauding hordes had been driven back to their native lands, tails between their legs. I lifted my gaze to the horizon. It was a clean line between blue and deeper blue, like a fold in a sheet of paper.
Mick sighed. “Pretty soon, the murre population was hanging by a thread. The fur seals had almost been hunted into extinction.”
I shifted restlessly, and he nudged me.
“Don’t fidget,” he said. “I’m getting there. All this is background.” He paused. “You see, these people left something behind.”
I glanced up at him.
“A body,” Mick said, his voice dropping an octave. “A woman’s skeleton. They found her in a cave.”
“A cave,” I repeated.
“She might have been a pirate’s wife or daughter. Or maybe an Aleut slave. Nobody has ever been able to discover her name. Even her nationality is up for debate. She might have been lying in that cave for a year, or a decade, or a century.” Mick elbowed me in the ribs, nearly knocking me over. “The corpse was taken away. They gave her a decent burial someplace. But”—he held up a finger—“her spirit is still here on Southeast Farallon.”
“This is starting to sound like a campfire story,” I said dubiously.
Mick ignored me. “The ghost has been seen lots of times. She wanders around the cabin at night, wearing a white dress. People have heard her footsteps. She makes the place feel cold on warm evenings.” His gestures grew more animated, and I took a hasty step back. “The ghost moves stuff around in empty rooms. She’ll knock a plate off a table or tilt a picture on the wall. She whispers in people’s ears when they’re sleeping.” He took a deep breath and concluded triumphantly, “I’ve seen her myself.”
“No way,” I said.
Mick paused, and I watched him, my eyebrows knotted.
“One night,” he said, “I was walking toward the cabin. This was last spring, maybe.” He paused again. “It had been a long day. One of the seal pups had died, and the mother was mourning. I couldn’t seem to let go of it. My brain was overloaded. I didn’t feel like myself. Then I looked up, and I saw somebody in your room.”
“My room?”
“The ghost likes your room,” he said, flashing a mischievous grin. “Didn’t I mention that? A thin person, very pale. Just standing at the window and staring out. I didn’t think much of it at the time. But when I got to the cabin, nobody was home. Nobody had been there all afternoon.”
In spite of myself, I felt a chill track down my spine.
I am aware that throughout history, photography has had a strong connection to the dead. Or perhaps the undead. Ghosts are often said to turn up on film—invisible in the moment to the human eye, appearing only afterward in the darkroom. I have seen some of these images myself. Floaty, pale shapes. Figures that cannot be explained by aperture or exposure. Blurred silhouettes at the back of an empty room.
“I believe you,” I said. “I believe in ghosts.”
Mick threw me a glance I couldn’t interpret. I lifted my camera and pointed it down the hill at the cabin. I took a picture.
5
TO MY SURPRISE, it has already happened. In fact, it happened this morning: I woke at dawn, and the islands felt familiar to me.
I have had this experience on my travels before, but it never palls. In the desert it took me a while to adjust to the bone-dry air. In the tropics it took me some time to grow accustomed to the overpowering odor of the trees, the blinding showers of hot rain. I once lived in a cave, snapping photos of bats for a week. Even then I did finally adapt to the odor of guano, the plink of water, the way the darkness seemed to crawl toward me along the walls. The process of habituation is always the same. What was alien becomes familiar—what was strange becomes ordinary—the glimmering viscera of the world are pulled inside out.
Yet it has rarely happened as rapidly as it has here. I opened my eyes this morning and was glad to be where I am.
Then, however, I heard grunting and moaning from downstairs. At once, I threw on my jeans and dashed into the hallway. Lucy and Andrew live directly beneath me. They are the cabin’s resident couple.
I know this will intrigue you. You always used to begin your perusal of the New York Times with the marriage announcements. I remember it well. You believed that you could predict with great accuracy whether each pair of newlyweds would go the distance. You included an immense variety of factors in your analysis. Whether either of them had been married before. Whether either was significantly older
, better-looking, or richer than the other. Whether their body language signaled ease or awkwardness in the snapshot. I was a logic-minded child, and I did point out that you had no way to verify your guesses. You could speculate all you wanted, but we would never know for sure. Still, your faith in your prognostications remained unshaken.
I will therefore share what I have gleaned about the lovebirds of the Farallon Islands, and you can decide for yourself whether they will succeed as a twosome. Lucy and Andrew are the same age—midtwenties, almost a decade younger than me. They are oddly matched. She is the sort of woman who would seem perfectly at home in pioneer garb, churning butter. She has a round, expansive, comfortable frame, her face as pink and wholesome as an apple. She is almost beautiful. In certain lights, from the right angle, she attains a fleeting loveliness. Most of the time, however, she is sturdy, warm, and homey.
Andrew, on the other hand, is a human glacier. He is pale all over, practically an albino, from his flaxen hair to his white-blue eyes. His disposition, too, is icy. During the past month, I have yet to see him express any emotion except a kind of ironic, adolescent disdain. He always wears a crimson stocking cap with a gold phoenix emblem. He keeps the cap tugged low over his ears at all times, which adds to the impression of jaded youth. His notes in the daily log are humorous but cutting. Important research now shows that the ocean is evil, he wrote one morning. And another day: Rescue ship still hasn’t gotten my signal. Mustn’t give up hope. Which cabin mate will I eat first? And then, just yesterday: I know which one I will eat first.
Lucy and Andrew came to the islands together. They began dating in college. Yet their personalities, like their physiques, could not be more dissimilar. Lucy is a human dynamo, a boundless spring of energy. Every morning, she is up before dawn, on the grounds, binoculars in hand. Rain and wind do not deter her. She is the bird girl, and her knowledge is encyclopedic. Whenever a feathery shape flits across the sky, she can, without even sparing it a second glance, identify it as auklet, cormorant, gull, or puffin. She rarely sits down. Her meals are eaten as she stands at the bookcase, flipping through a reference tome or gazing out the window, her expression wistful, like a house cat wishing to be let into the garden. Still chewing, she will throw on her jacket and hurry toward Sea Pigeon Gulch.
In the evenings, we all tend to drop off early. (It is remarkable how the internal clock aligns with the circadian rhythm—if there’s absolutely nothing to do after dark.) But Lucy does not doze. She cleans. I can hear you spluttering that of course the woman is the one doing the mopping and sweeping. And yet, in Lucy’s case, it’s more than that. Nobody can venture outside safely at night, on the slippery shore, on the uneven slope. It is tricky in broad daylight, impossible in darkness. I learned this the hard way during my first week in this place. Trapped indoors, Lucy must do something else with her excess vitality. As she wipes down the countertops and scrubs the pots, her eyes shine with purpose.
Andrew, on the other hand, is bone-lazy. He can’t be bothered to rise before ten a.m. Out here, that is an eternity of time wasted, the entire morning gone. He is a bird specialist too—he and Lucy met in a biology seminar—but he does not walk the grounds with her. He stays inside where it’s warm, writing notes for a research paper that never seems to reach completion.
A few other details that might interest you:
1. Andrew and Lucy have sex every day. Every day, without fail, rain or shine. I sleep directly above them, and each sigh and moan passes right through my floorboards.
2. I don’t think I have ever seen a woman adore her man more. Her sun rises and sets on him. That kind of devotion is unsettling.
3. I do not like Andrew. I don’t like him at all. There is something about him that I do not understand or trust. A deadness behind the eyes.
THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, I wandered the grounds. I cannot explain the joy I was feeling. Everything about the islands seemed exquisite to me. The salt-infused air. The crash of the surf. The shimmy of the mice darting across my peripheral vision. The granite that crackled and fragmented away beneath my boots.
I wanted a picture of the light on the water, broken up by islets. I had learned from my fall and injury. My camera now hung on a secure strap around my neck. I knew to stop in my tracks, plant my feet, and check my surroundings before I succumbed to the beauty of an image. I was in the process of framing the shot—settling myself like a tripod—when I looked down and gasped.
The islands had given me a present. There, between my feet, lay a seal stone. These were rare and precious things, left on the shore by the elusive fur seals. Gastroliths, they were called. Mick had described them to me, but I had not expected to find one myself. I had not thought I was worthy of such a miracle.
I knelt down and picked it up. It felt wonderful in my hand. Perfectly round. Smooth and dense. It looked as though it had been inside a polisher. It was made of something darker and more compact than the flaky granite of the islands. The fur seals ate these stones, maybe for ballast, maybe for digestion. No one knew why. Up to ten pounds of rocks in the gut. Grinning, I turned it over in my palms.
I slipped it into the pocket of my coat. There was something reassuring about its weight, its heft. Its perfect sphericality. Its wildness. It had been carried in the belly of a seal until it was rendered flawless.
There was a noise behind me. I whirled around and saw Andrew. Crimson hat. Hands in pockets. Smirking face. He was a little too close. I hadn’t heard him until he was almost on top of me. I stood up quickly, dusting off my hands.
“You want to be careful,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
His eyes were so blue. They looked like windows, as though I were seeing through him to the sky behind.
“You don’t want to get hurt again,” he said. “A little thing like you.”
I was gripping my camera like a shield. Andrew smiled and sloped off, shoulders hunched, heading for the cabin. I watched him go with relief.
Then a hint of motion caught my eye. There was someone else outside—a shape on Lighthouse Hill. I thought it was Lucy. But the figure was gone so fast that I could have been mistaken. It could have been a trick of the light.
6
WE ARE DEEP into Shark Season. I came to the islands in late summer, and my arrival coincided with a vast influx of white sharks. (The great, I have learned, is only used by ignorant nonbiologists.) On my travels, I have encountered dreadful creatures before—leeches with a penchant for armpits, crocodiles masquerading as logs, irate lions. For nearly five months, I once lived in the rainforest; I slept in a hut and bathed with a bucket. The rules of my visits were strict: no littering, no hiking except on the designated trails, and, whatever the provocation, no destruction of any living thing. This included venomous tarantulas and foot-long centipedes. I loved that place as a photographic object, but by the end I was dying for a cup of real coffee, a change of clothes, and the feel of a stiff breeze on my skin. I found that, of all things, I missed the look of straight lines. There were none in that eruption of greenery.
But the white sharks have a lethal charm all their own.
Galen and Forest are our shark specialists. In the past month, I have learned a bit more about these two, but my initial impression of them has not changed all that much. Galen is white-haired, venerable, and never in a particularly good mood. He still strikes me as being an elderly god of the sea—possibly omnipotent, probably omniscient. He knows everything that happens here. He watches the tides. He organizes repairs on the cabin, the boats. He can recite the history of the Farallon Islands with the scholarly air of a college professor. He has a thousand animal facts at his fingertips. Though his raison d’être is the sharks, I have seen him sitting on the porch beside Lucy, helping her to dissect the wing of a dead cormorant like a trained veterinarian. He can read the coming weather at a glance.
Forest, on the other hand, is an enigma. A dark-haired, cold-blooded naiad. Galen’s right hand. Forest eats, sleeps, and bre
athes work. I have yet to hold a conversation with him that has not centered on something to do with biology: the anatomy of harbor seals, the local varieties of comb jellies, or the weather patterns as related to bird migrations. The one time I dared to ask him where he’d grown up, he shot me a withering look, like a Victorian butler reprimanding an impertinent housemaid. Like the others here, he seems to have no past, or a distinct unwillingness to discuss it. Once, long ago, I read that all nuns who joined a convent were forbidden from speaking about their lives before. The Farallon Islands seem to be a religious order in their own right, with a similar vow of silence.
Galen and Forest catalog and track the population of white sharks. Throughout the autumn, the two men rise at four-thirty in the morning to start the watch. During every hour of daylight, one of them is in position in the lighthouse, keeping an eye out for blood on the water. Against every basic human instinct, they hurry toward a feeding frenzy. They board one of the boats and head out to sea, armed with video cameras, tagging equipment, and the “dummy,” a surfboard painted like a seal to lure the sharks in closer. The two of them live to make contact with these creatures. Galen and Forest are lunatics, to put it frankly. Galen has mentioned that he dreams about the white sharks every single night. Forest sketches a shark’s silhouette—lean, rough, and spiked with fins—on any nearby surface. He does this unconsciously, doodling on the table, on a book I once left open on the couch.
At this time of year, there can be two or three kills a day. The sharks eat the seals and sea lions. There is enough prey here to sustain a massive host of predators. The birds will mark the spot like an X on a map. Watching from the lighthouse, Forest or Galen will spy a collection of gulls diving over a patch of sea. The cry will go up. Boots are thrown on—coats flung over shirts—a thunder of feet on the stairs. Forest uses a child’s scooter with streamers on the handlebars to make his downhill run from the lighthouse that much faster. One of these days he will break his neck.
