The High Places

by Fiona McFarlane

  ‘Hands out, eyes closed,’ said Miss Lewis, and darkness fell. ‘Don’t forget, Jyoti, no giving the Button to the person who was just It. Don’t give the Button to Joseph.’

  It was necessary to remind the children of this rule at the beginning of every game; otherwise they were capable of handing the Button over to Joseph at any opportunity. As it was, Jyoti picked Archie and Archie picked Joseph. Joseph picked Mimi who picked Miranda who picked Joseph. The afternoon grew brighter. Planes flew overhead in all directions. The jacaranda dropped its spring flowers. Every now and then Miss Lewis saw faces at the windows of classrooms as other children looked out to see them playing Buttony. How long had they been playing now? These children could spend the whole afternoon hoping to be chosen by Joseph. They would never tire of it.

  Joseph picked Ruby picked Ramon picked Joseph picked Liam S picked Liam M picked Joseph. Joseph said, Buttony, Buttony, Buttony, twenty-one times. Miss Lewis closed her eyes and kept them closed when she said, ‘Open your eyes.’ The children, in turn, said, Buttony, Buttony, Buttony. She uncrossed her ankles and crossed them again and thought, Every day could pass like this, quite easily. Every day could be sweet and green with the jacaranda and the children and the sun and the planes. And then at the end of them all, the sweet days and the children, Would you open your eyes? Would your hands fall open? Would they be empty?

  Miss Lewis looked. Joseph stood in the circle.

  ‘Hands out, close your eyes,’ she said, and the children obeyed. They bent their heads as if praying. She was moved by the tenderness she saw fall on each of them. They were like children in a fairy tale, under a spell. She looked at Joseph and he was watching her, so she nodded at him. His face was impassive. He made her think of a Swiss Guard at the Vatican. He received her nod by beginning to walk around the circle, and each hand he touched trembled, and every child lowered their head still further as he passed them. Their hands closed like sea anemones. Joseph hadn’t yet given away the Button. Fifteen, nineteen, twenty-one times he said Buttony. Then he raised his neutral face and looked at Miss Lewis and opened his mouth and placed the Button inside it. The Button made no indentation in his cheek. Miss Lewis crossed her arms. You will solve this, she thought, and suffer for it. Joseph blinked inside his hair.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ said Miss Lewis. The children lifted their heads into the burden of their love for Joseph. They smiled and squirmed and began to guess: Phoebe, Ruby, Usha, Archie, Blake. Joseph turned toward every name as it was called, as if waiting to see who might produce the Button. Liam S, Bella, Jackson, Xin. Twenty names, and twenty hands falling open. Only Jyoti remained. She stood with her rigid hands, with her desperate smile, with her socks slipping. No one wanted to say her name. They wanted her to give herself up. Miss Lewis, too, wanted Jyoti to give herself up. Eventually Ramon said, ‘Jyoti.’

  Jyoti opened her empty hands.

  The circle laughed. Miss Lewis had found that children, as a rule, didn’t like practical jokes. There was a certain kind of laughter that, in children, was a howl. Ramon took Jyoti’s wrists and inspected her hands. No one looked at Joseph, but they all saw Jyoti: the mole on her cheek, the dusty mark where she’d rubbed her shin with the heel of her shoe, the crookedness of her teeth. Jyoti might have been crying. Ramon threw her wrists down as if discarding them. Then every child save Joseph and Jyoti began to cry out, just as they’d done when they wanted to play Buttony. They stamped their feet and kicked at the grass. They shook their uniforms and looked up into the branches of the jacaranda tree, as if they might find the Button in these places. Their circle broke open as they shook and kicked and shouted, and faces appeared again in classroom windows.

  Miss Lewis watched Joseph stand there with his mouth closed and his hands behind his back. Although the circle had broken, he still seemed to be in the middle of it. He was only a boy and he was alone and proud and terrible. Miss Lewis stepped away from the tree. She would order him to open his mouth and spit out the Button. She would make him say what he had done, how he had stood and watched the children guess; she would shame him, and the faces in the windows would see it.

  But first she should settle the children. She clapped her hands five times in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet, but they didn’t copy her. She saw the way they looked at her; she saw their fury. Ramon came first, to pull at her pockets. Then Josie, who had lost a tooth that morning; her mouth was open as she searched the grass at Miss Lewis’s feet. Osea and Mimi scratched at the scabbed bark of the tree. Miss Lewis swatted and slapped, but the children still came. They opened her hands and dug in her elbows. Liam S squatted to peer up her skirt, and when she crouched to stop him, it was Jyoti who pulled the pins from her hair, as if the Button might be hidden in its roots. Now Miss Lewis cried out. She lifted her head and saw Mr Graham running from the 3A classroom. And Joseph was behind him, not quite running, not altogether, but like a shadow, long and blank and beautiful.

  Good News for Modern Man

  When I began my study of the colossal squid, I still believed in God. The squid seemed to me then, in those God days, to be the secretly swimming proof of a vast maker who had bestowed intelligence – surprisingly, here and there – on both man and mollusc. I’ve discussed this with Charles Darwin, who visits me most days, always a little out of breath. His cheeks are red, his hair white. He looks nothing like a ghost. He puts his feet up on the rocks and gazes out over this small corner of the Pacific, calm at sundown and partially obscured by a mosquito haze. We sit above the tree line and consider the movements of the colossal squid in her bay below. She moves this way and that; she floats and billows in the tide. She reminds me of my mother’s underwear soaking in a holiday basin. Her official name, her name in polite company, is Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. We’ve named her Mabel and together we plan to free her.

  It’s no easy thing, this freeing of a colossal squid. It was difficult enough to imprison her in the first place. There is the issue of her size.

  ‘A colossal squid,’ I tell Darwin, ‘makes a giant squid look like a bath toy.’

  He agrees with me, although as far as I know he has never seen either a bath toy or a giant squid. He remains surprisingly unexcited by my account of Mabel’s capture: the months-long hunt with smaller squid for bait, the boredom and fussy seasickness, Mabel emerging from the sea with her hood pink in the sudden sun. She flailed at the surface, she swam and sounded, smelling as much like the sea as anything I have ever smelled. But we hooked her, and we panicked her, and she raced ahead of us, right into this bay, through a narrow channel that we were able to block. And now she spends her days here, rotating among her many arms, and I spend my days watching her. They’re going to build her a facility, but first there’s money to raise and laws to change. For now it’s just the two of us – and Darwin.

  Darwin first appeared on my 402nd day on the island. We often argue, but in a neutral, brotherly sort of way, and I appreciate his company. The sun sinks into the sea, but we also see it rise from the sea. This makes the world seem very small, even though we’re two hours from any town. There’s a Catholic school higher up the mountain and we see the girls walk down to the water and back up again. I hear their singing in the early morning and it surprises me; at sundown it makes me sad. Late in the afternoons they swim in the white sea – far out into the lagoon, where I often see bullet-shaped sharks. Darwin and I take turns peering through my binoculars. It’s an innocent and companionable lechery. Although he’s a ghost, he leaves sweat around the eyepieces.

  I’ve been thinking for some time of taking one of the monthly supply boats back to New Zealand, then a plane home. At home the rain will be cold, pigeons will grow fat, there will be supermarkets. I’ve refused replacements and talked up the malarial solitude and now no one will come, not even over-eager graduate students with an itching for the Pacific. But this is my 498th day on the island, and lately I’m troubled by headaches and abrupt changes in temperature. There�
�s something feverish about this air. It’s not only the headaches, although they’re bad enough; my major symptom is a kind of vertigo, a frequent and sudden awareness that the universe is expanding out from me. This feeling begins with my feet, as if the ground – the planet – the galaxy – has suddenly dropped away from them and I’m floating untethered in space, only space doesn’t exist, and neither does my body. I can only describe the sensation as the suspension of nothing in nothing. But I look down and there are my feet, dirt-brown, and there are Darwin’s, sensibly shod. Below our feet swims Mabel. It’s only while watching Mabel that I feel tied to the earth once more and a sense of order is restored. Still, that moment of vertigo is briefly and terrifyingly glorious. It reminds me of the way, when I was younger, I used to feel my body respond to the singing of hymns: an interior fire, a constriction of the heart that I took for a visitation of the Holy Spirit. I never mentioned this sensation to anyone. Maybe other people feel it. Perhaps the schoolgirls on the mountain feel it, singing in their concrete church: the large feeling of singing toward something that sings back. I often wondered if sex felt that way, undernourished adolescent that I was. And now – the quiet sky, the patient waiting, the tick of time in the bones, until the world rushes out and the vanishing of the cosmos presents itself again, magnificent.

  I’ve told Darwin of my troubles (he suspects malaria, which is possible; I stopped taking my meds on day 300, partly because of the dreams they gave me, bright crystal dreams of exhausting flight). Sitting here, atop our hot rock, we might be the last two survivors of the flood, chosen by Noah: a pair of scientists, two by two. But the ark broke up somewhere along the Line and left us stranded with a squid for company. Darwin regards me sadly when I say this, stroking his diluvian chin.

  ‘Geology,’ he says, ‘disproves you.’

  ‘I know,’ I tell him. ‘It’s a joke.’

  I live in an astronomical observation station owned and, until recently, forgotten by the New Zealand government. It’s partway up the mountain, and I can walk down to the sea in thirteen minutes. Paths have been cut into the rock, as if this were a holiday beach frequented by sure-footed children, but it’s still a relief to step out onto the sand from the mountain path, to see the sea spread wide and to my left the smaller inlet that is Mabel’s temporary home. The clear water is deeper than it looks from above. When I say the water in Mabel’s bay is clear, I don’t mean it’s transparent, but that it’s see-throughable, and Mabel is see-able there at the bottom. I feed her fish thawed from a deep freeze, or freshly caught if I’m in the mood, and these she grasps at the end of her tentacles and rolls up toward her beaked mouth. The coral sand is sharp and clean and my feet never feel dirty. When Darwin accompanies me (which he usually does on those days I’m feeling my worst), he only removes his shoes to wade into the shallows, and then his feet are the delicate brown and blue and yellow of Galápagos finches.

  The view of Mabel from the shore is more intimate than the bird’s-eye view from my station fifteen metres above. It’s impossible to take in her vastness or the pattern of her tentacles and arms, so it’s her eyes that fascinate me. They interest Darwin as well. They’re hard to avoid. Mabel has the largest eye in creation, and it looks like ours, although its structure is entirely different. This humanoid appearance far out on the lone branch of invertebrate evolution gave scientists pause, at one time; they paused over Darwin and his theory of natural selection. The eye of the squid once gave my friend a great deal of trouble. Now he and I stand on the shore and consider the vertebrate appearance of Mabel’s canny eye. It looks so very God-given. Difficult to assume that such an eye doesn’t think, or ponder, or dream.

  I think about squid too much, Darwin cautions me.

  ‘A squid is not a human,’ he says.

  ‘A human is just another animal,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, no,’ says Darwin. ‘The highest of the animals.’

  ‘Careful,’ I tell him.

  We argue about this – the concept of progress, the tricky politics of supposing one thing higher than another. He’s impatient with the twentieth century on this point. He doesn’t seem to have noticed the twenty-first has begun, and I don’t tell him. I do tell him that whenever I spend an extended length of time with Mabel, peering into her large eye from the rocks on the shore, I find myself shaking off the feeling that there’s a person inside her, watching me. Darwin mocks this as sentimental. He says this sensation is so typical as to be ‘fatally unfresh’. I suppose my desire to free Mabel is similarly unfresh. But there are no fresh desires.

  Today I feel very well. I feel an immense good health. Today I feel with great certainty my precise location upon the earth, the latitude and longitude, the position of the sun. This is important, because today we free Mabel. The date is September 23rd, but that’s elsewhere. Here on this island we’ve dropped out of time, although once, I believe, the island was within time: when it was first created, it was a definite volcanic event. Then the rock subsided, the sea settled, the coral multiplied, and the powerful boats of the islanders came. Whalers and traders, adventurers, missionaries, and gentleman naturalists endlessly agog at the taxonomic world. Mabel’s arrival might qualify as an occasion, a specific point on a timeline, except that the strangest of sea creatures must come butting up against this place in secret, yesterday and today and tomorrow, and usually there’s no one here to care or notice. No, the real things of the world take place elsewhere. And yet today will be an eventful day, and yesterday was too. So these are the end times.

  Yesterday I visited the Catholic school. I have an arrangement with the school: I go there once a month and am driven into town by the school’s driver. We travel in a primordial jeep. In town, I pick up the supplies shipped in by my research group and send my month’s data home; then we drive back to the school. It’s a suitable arrangement for everyone, worked out in the distant days in which I was apparently capable of dreaming up such things: the school, which seems to exist in a state of immaculate fundlessness, gets some of my grant money, and I don’t have to go to the trouble of maintaining a vehicle. I order in treats for the schoolgirls: lollies and biscuits, novelty erasers, books. These I pass on to the head of the school, Father Anthony, who always wants me to come to his office for a chat; I always refuse him. Every month I anticipate these trips with an obscure dread.

  For the past few months, Father Anthony has been inviting me to address his students on the subject of marine life. I declined at first. It felt false to arrive at the school and pose as an expert when a) I no longer believe in God, and b) to this date my most significant contribution to the science of the squid is the observation that male colossal squid probably do have a penis. I discussed my qualms with Darwin and he rejected them immediately. First of all, he said, I am a scientist, and these priests and nuns and children are not. They don’t know how many papers I haven’t had in Nature. Second, I’ve been invited to speak on marine, not heavenly, life, so my lack of faith shouldn’t interfere. And third, I have a problem that I need help with: namely, freeing Mabel. It was Darwin’s suggestion that the school may be able to provide this help. He has a tactical mind.

  I delivered my talk yesterday, after my usual visit to town in the jeep. The driver of the jeep, Eric, is a sinewy man of tremendous energy. I understand that he does various kinds of physical work for the school: gardening and maintenance as well as driving. When he talks, which is rarely, it’s mostly about the branch of his family who moved to America long ago and are thriving there as if having discovered a taproot from which they were once dramatically severed. Eric speaks of America with an ancient nostalgia, but refuses to go because he was born on this island and his elderly father lives here. His energy is badly placed behind the wheel of a car. He sits in tense near-sightedness, coiled, attentive, as if he’s offended by the stillness required in order to travel so far so quickly. The roads are covered at all times in blotchy fruits that, when crushed, spill out slippery seeds. Apparently, the animal that
would once have eaten them – a large bird with a frighteningly hooked claw – is so near extinction it now trembles with evolutionary neurosis in the quietest corners of the forest, eating less perilous fruits. These are the roads we take – viscous, birdless – into town. Town: one store and five drinking establishments. When the supply ship docks, the entire place seems to double in size. I like arriving with Eric. He knows everyone, and with him I’m greeted like a brother. Without him I appear to go unnoticed, which I know is not the case.

  Yesterday, everything was quite normal – my crates were stacked on the dock, already clear of ‘Customs’ – except for the presence of five white women, all young and dressed in T-shirts and baseball caps. They sat together on benches by the dock, fanning themselves with the necks of their shirts and glowing with satisfaction at their evident discomfort. The girls rested their heads on each other’s shoulders and took self-portraits with their mobile phones, and no one paid them any attention. They looked to have been sitting there for some time.

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked Eric.

  ‘Students,’ he said.

  ‘Students? Where from?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Someone must know!’ I said. ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘They’re waiting for someone to drive them.’

  ‘To drive them where?’

  ‘Around.’

  After our errands we went to a bar, where we found the young men who clearly accompanied the girls outside. They were discussing this question of a driver with the patrons. Their American voices and emphatic gestures lacked economy in the midmorning heat. Eric expressed no interest in interacting with the visitors, so I lost interest in them too. All kinds of people come through this place, just as I’ve done. They’re none of my business. We drank, we drove the slippery roads, and Eric delivered me back to the school in time for my presentation.