Flame Angels

by Robert Wintner

  Because, you would have sunk is why not. And the sooner you can set that scene aside...

  Never mind, this ferry should not go huli or take much longer than the daily run to the scuba adventure grounds, which, come to think of it, is underway this very minute. French Polynesia is due south with a dash of east from Hawaii and in the same time zone, which odd parallel in time and distance from the equator seem like a discrepancy. Time stays the same, even as space so thoroughly differs. Ravid Rockulz realizes that he feels great, beyond sugar and caffeine to a brand-new day and a new life adventure. Well, maybe he’s immersed in sugar and caffeine rather than beyond, but still, recent ills have a strong chance of displacement by charm and soulful communion in these new and unspoiled tropics.

  For starters, the southern hemisphere has a fraction the landmass of the northern, and most of that land is Africa and Antarctica. That makes Oceania true to its name and spirit. Then comes human population density, or lack thereof. The southern hemisphere has ninety percent fewer humans than above the line — ninety percent! That stat alone shrinks the cockles of a misanthropic waterman’s heart and leaves him giddy at prospects for meeting new citizens of differing fins and feathers, so to beak — I mean speak. Ha!

  The watery realm is everywhere, with perfect parity among persons of the human and other species. With so much ocean and so little land, a human might again be optimistic over meeting others of his ilk, instead of avoiding eye contact. He wonders if the garish innocents of the gill-breathing species will be equally free of civilization’s harsh conditioning. Why should they fear what they’ve never suffered?

  So the theory shapes up, at any rate, with the theorist resolved to apply it on the island of Moorea a short while down the line. The approach is lushly green and rural, unlike Papeete, an urban center thick with traffic, lights, signs, buildings, cars, exhaust, crowds and commerce, an urban core with palm trees on a suburban rock called Tahiti. Ah, well; at least it’s only the twenty-first century and not the twenty-second or the twenty-fourth.

  Never mind. Nine miles will suffice. It’s too far to swim and will be the moat to the castle of tropical eternity for my practical purposes, if the place has a smidgeon of what it appears to have.

  So it is that Ravid Rockulz feels the springtide of hope rise in his heart, pushed higher by a storm surge of emotion — before ebbing to dramatic emptiness.

  What if? What if not?

  So the ferry nears Moorea, casually plying the breakers, with Ravid yawing between hope and dread but feeling different than two nights ago in the ink-dark sea. That was living death, while the dread here is merely fear of failure, which is a nice cup of tea compared to sea monsters, instant shredding, engorgement and...

  “Fuck.” He shudders unavoidably, forgetting too easily the lessons learned about fear and faith.

  With proper perspective, homecoming is at hand. The perils ahead are no different than negative potential for any new life in a new place. So? The worse potential may be that of mind-numbing ignorance metastasizing to the major organs. Any place can cause that, if a man pursues drudgery and security in denial of the inevitable. Most people surrender life to the humdrum days. That’s why happiness in life requires the living to stay lively with an eye to weather.

  This place could be rife with cross current and undertow, like Hawaii years ago, though that was different, because a young man views the world as his adventure grounds and a man in waning youth has a view of something else. The road was home back then, a path to fortune, such as it was. At nearly twice that age, he needs traction to make his mark and grow some moss. He needs a more judicious approach. Okay, so the hot blood is down to room temperature. This feels way better than treading water in the dark, adrift. Pushing forty is not pushing fifty or sixty. And any nincompoop can fake the hot blood from time to time as necessary — which isn’t to say grow up but to remind an aging free spirit to grow wise.

  So he tingles as the mountainside looms nearer, its million fronds waving in the breeze. Who knows? Maybe a little moss won’t hurt.

  Several busses wait at the ferry terminal. At the first one, he asks for a nice, cheap hotel. The driver scoffs, “Monsieur, it is only cheap if you are rich. Are you rich?”

  “No. I’m not rich. But I...”

  “Taverua.”

  “Okay, take me there, si’l vous plaît.”

  The ride is good, hot and ponderous, penetrating a place that makes sense. Tired and sweaty by mid-morning, he feels the day as yet another milestone of productivity. In a slog and a burden, a dream comes true in a postcard picture of what happened to Ravid Rockulz. It’s Paradise revisited, like back in the day, when once upon a time on a tropical island there arrived a man who...

  So regrets and hopes reach a delicate balance. Grief is fended off on the one hand, while on the other is a new world to embrace. Oceania comes on in waves. A dewy, green tint clearly casts the heat-rippled haze in the past and the future. Converged at last are regret and hope, longing and fulfillment. All are now in a balance that is both cause and antidote for doubt. No sooner does a forlorn man hark back than he’s thrust ahead, to a dream of what might be. And here it is, moist and dilated, receptive as a tropical maiden unhindered by missionary tabu ever could be.

  Strolling forward, innocent and blissful, into a happily ever after, the wide-eyed child of misfortune and the seasoned man of the world become one. Tropical beauty with very few human people is only vaguely recalled in Hawaii. Opening his arms in acceptance, he feels the vibration — still a man off kilter, listing to port, unhinged and not quite connected, he makes the turn to the home stretch, very near to feeding the hunger and quenching the thirst. The monkish might call this an illusion, a deception of the life process, whereby desire seeks fulfillment, yet the monks obsess on itchy garments, celibacy, silence, saltines and water in what may comprise a lust of a different nature, a perversion unique to their strange appetite and quest. But let no appetite or quest be dismissed, if the pilgrim harms no other in seeking sustenance and meaning.

  I, waterman, am here.

  A man who makes his living underwater, who packs his worldly belongings in a few bags and flies on short notice to an exotic island below the equator on a vague idea of right stimuli is not your average commuter. For years he thought different was good, that a blessed life was better than a stifled one. Maybe it is. Unless it isn’t — but damn, this looks right.

  And a mid-life migration must indicate liberation from the attachments binding most men. What’s lacking here may be a sense of risk, a notion of what could go wrong, but if a man has nothing more to lose, then he’s a victor already. Or is that the rationale of losers? Or the sophistry of the spirited failure?

  Ravid Rockulz may be similar to his friends and colleagues working the charter boats in their regard for fun as the meaning of life, but he is by no means statistically average. This jaunt puts him farther afield than most, taking far more risk, verging on peril. He has given up a tropical paradise gone commercial to seek something better with no guarantee, no connection, no nothing but the sea bag in hand and some odd camera and dive gear. He stands out as a risk taker — that unique breed most rewarded by most systems. Most men choose comfort and the grind for security with a woman of acceptable mental, sexual and cooking skills, or they take that path by default, by failing to resist it, rationalizing with a weak laugh over the shit we must put up with — as men.

  Yet a few keep the horizon in view — with longing to know what’s over it that might be better than this socially contrived compromise. Most settle for something less than true happiness or total misery. Not that non-stop happiness is available anywhere, and Ravid Rockulz may be presumptuous to imagine long-term potential in the last nineteen years of the razzle-dazzle parade of thrill-seeking, appreciative women. Rather, they saw the fire in his eyes and wanted to camp beside it, to roast a few weenies and tell stories, to drink and dance and make memorable love on the vacation of a lifetime. Some of them stayed
for five days, and nearly all said they loved their time with him...

  Then he defaulted like the rest, no better than the commonest drone seeking cover. So he fell into the pit with the sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom...

  Stop that —

  In the last nineteen years, Ravid Rockulz has had neither the ability nor the inclination to pledge rent, groceries, clothing, medical and a nest egg for the children and their futures, beginning with four hundred thousand dollars each to pay for college — at least the tuition, lodging and meals part. He forgot about that practical money stuff when he fell into the love hole — lost himself in the snatch distraction, which is the trick nature plays on young, happy men, luring them into the trap.

  Once through the flimsy cover and falling to the bamboo stakes, they face more woe than impracticality. Figurative death is quick, but on the way to impalement is time aplenty to sense happiness, freedom and mobility ending. The stakes pierce. No more will the young heart sing; gone is the spiritual affluence of the unencumbered — even with love and all it represents.

  Hey. A guy can make a mistake; it’s what life and learning are all about. It’s not only okay, it’s also a necessary, constructive process, providing that the guy comes out a little bit smarter than he went in. Hey, are we up and out of the hole, or what?

  The important lesson to take from the ashes of a fizzled campfire called youth in a misbegotten wilderness riddled with traps is the lesson on life. This is not sophistry seeking to make mud pies out of mud but poignant insight for the persons involved. That is, most lives defer to something or other, usually requiring money, which comes from parents or requires sacrifice. Sacrifice means less mobility and spontaneity, or, in more immediate language, the adventure and glory are traded in for something else.

  The picture fogs here on the payout, or the something else; vague images elude focus, like grown children looking unready for the real world with big grins under their caps and gowns on a day of days to make the parents proud of what they obtained. Then the kids move back in or ask for more money to, you know, get started. Or maybe they get menial jobs or knocked up or otherwise bound by practicality and begin their own process of compromise and sacrifice, with heart-warming visits on the coldest days of the year.

  It’s something like that, with a new batch of lovely little grands in there before you know it, puking and shitting about, which is actually a cute thing to photograph, but there’s no rush, since they won’t be litter trained for a few years yet, just prior to the advent of decrepitude.

  But come off it. That talk is cynical and depressed and ignorant of the rich nuance so available to a soul and its parent, like, for example, between Ravid Rockulz and his mother of all mothers, Basha Rivka, herself an icon — a warrior woman who did it all, conquering practicality, hormonal weakness, needs fulfilled, survival and motherhood, resulting in success, with a waterman known in the region for vigor and spirit as her son. If she’s a little neurotic and pushy, then these are small faults in the context of greater glory. Which fairly proves that you can’t sum up the outcome of any prospect with glib generalities.

  It’s like they say in Vegas: If you don’t play, you can’t win. Not that life is a casino, or that playing won’t set you up for losing — maybe losing everything. But a betting man knows to enjoy his winnings while he can, because you might crap out on the very next roll — which is more or less what happened, when you think about it... And any chronically betting bachelor with no social matrix, no professional connections, no home and an objective so vague it could be called wishful might just be done with risk taking — that is, ready to set it aside. Because he’s taken his fair share of risks, and like every man who ever breathed clean air he has proven himself a loser. A bum...

  Unless...

  Never mind. Nobody plays forever and keeps on beating the house. It’s statistically impossible.

  So maybe he didn’t fall onto the bamboo stakes. Maybe he only took a break from the razzle-dazzle cavalcade of women to open his heart to a single woman. Well, she went sour on him, but that was as much a shock to him as were the events that came in her wake. Not only that, the correct path feels close at hand, with yesterday’s tropical props in Hawaii wholly displaced by today’s teeming essence in French Polynesia.

  In Hawaii, many palm trees are part of a commercial landscaping plan, and many reefs have no fish because of aquarium collectors plucking gems from the crown as easily as the missionaries plucked land from the Hawaiians. What remains is a pressure cooker of suburban fantasy merchandizing in a context of human livelihood rendered sacred — by humans. Modern Hawaii is regretted by much of the general population for what happened there, with the cars, hotels, cultural claims and demands competing with the money motive. Poverty, decimation and growth prevail, ending a balance of centuries, so a more perfect Hawaii as seen in magazines can fetch a better price. Or maybe it’s a lower price with more people arriving to pay it. So much scenic vista and terrific cleavage proves the value from either perspective, so you still get your money.

  But this can’t go on, even as the pressure cooker steams with demand for jobs, affordability, growth and more, more, more.

  The culture at hand, however, is merely hot. Polynesia rejuvenates, because less is indeed more and weighs in profoundly with silence, till that too is offset by growth of a more original source — by the teeming vines and all who live among them. Bird chatter and insect hum gain volume on the breeze as the bus shuts its door on the passenger just delivered to the country road of his dreams. He watches the bus blow smoke on its way up that road and around the bend till it fades, and so begins authentication of the now here. He listens — a meditation that could go on for minutes or years, and so it will, beginning with a turn and first step up the drive. Around the curve the bus shifts to fourth and subsides to the bugs, birds and breeze.

  Ravid heard this place described as Hawaii fifty years ago, or a hundred. He thought that comparison casual, convenient and unlikely. Now he feels it, though the first mile from the ferry dock was foul with excavation, heavy equipment and no concern for reef destruction. The elderly woman one seat up pointed out the window at the eventual clubhouse, restaurant and golf course, the first in French Polynesia after years of struggle for and against, till the yen prevailed; beside the road, Japanese engineers consulted clipboards, double-checking and re-measuring for perfection, preserving their honor and nothing but, to avoid personal failure and its incumbent self-destruction.

  Ah, well, fifty years or a hundred might still be time enough to get a sane man through this life of madness.

  The house halfway up the drive appears to be asleep, though a child ambles out with a sleepy greeting and a key. She points to the bungalow at the top. She smiles shyly and says in French that he can come back down later to sign and pay. “Après midi,” she giggles, and runs back inside, making him wonder if she thinks he’s laughable or part of the madcap world arriving daily.

  The bungalow at the top is existentially tropical — hot, humid, lush, buzzing, crawling in the green tint of tropical foliage outside, enclosed by four walls of wood sheathing nailed to painted studs that frame huge screened windows. The studs are exposed on the inside, and in perfect stillness the scene seeps into senses, constantly moving. Thick and steamy, the air collects in droplets and rolls from the forehead down the nose and chin. It drips. Or it diverts to the neck and on down the arms or the chest and the ribs, till the shirt sticks to the skin and wicks on down to the pants. Small consolation arises in the undiluted sounds — fronds rub fondly, big insects and their eight-legged cousins or their hundred-legged in-laws pop knuckles and do the natural thing to smaller insects, birds chirp, and waves break just across the road. Greater consolation derives from the ceiling fan that groans to life at one speed: painfully slow. Soon the atmosphere slides hither and yon, oozing marginally elsewhere in a dazed state of subconscious merging; call it sleep, a known remedy for the anxiously depressed and mortally fatigued
. Hardly a napper, Ravid drifts through an hour and a half of it and sits up, all wet, not exactly refreshed but not as bone tired either.

  He shuffles down to the front house to sign in and pay, and discovers additional comfort in the rate of sixty dollars per night, economical by any standard, especially the one by which cash expenditure must be measured in this new life. Efficiency and necessity must be foremost for now. The old rent on the beach came in at three bucks less than this, at fifty-seven a day, but that was back in the day, already the day before yesterday, or was it the day before that, with income. So caution is a watchword, because this new life may drift indefinitely, figuratively speaking, of course.

  Across the road is a hotel one star up, constructed mostly of tropical-grain Formica and staples with a thatched polymer roof to capture essential charm and match its de rigueur status as waterfront, at a hundred and sixty per night. What is a room but a place to lie down in the dark and sleep? So a brief victory celebration is in order, because a man tuned in to the elements shouldn’t need an air conditioner or decent fan, and may better begin a new life with a walk down the drive, under the trees and across the road to the dining room built on pylons over the water, where coffee and something to eat are more easily justified with such savings on the rent.

  Revelations continue. A newcomer sees what long-termers become inured to, and in this case the more so. Ravid has seen the future and come back from it like a time traveler with harrowing news and warnings of what must be avoided — back to this place that feels like a long-gone place in the heart, like a homecoming at last. Aloha and ia orana intertwine with the spirit of the place and settle on his shoulders like a lei. The people here have surely heard the news; surely they must know, most of them, that convenience to church, schools and shopping can kill a place off as quick as supply fails to meet demand — kill the magic one cell at a time so that you won’t see it dying till it’s too late. Well, they don’t seem to know, and it’s not my place to tell them. Circumspection would best advise a man to be happy and let happiness be in all things around him, sharing what he knows only as those around him are ready to receive it.