And then, after lunch and before the late-afternoon donut rush, someone notices a fat man facedown in the pool. He is bobbing against the topless goddess statue. Five feet of water, right in the middle of the resort, no splash. His countrymen are all around, with oversweet cocktails in plastic cups, angry sunburns beneath their all-access wrist bracelets. The body is gathered by Emir—suddenly serious, suddenly silent—with the help of two leaf-collecting nets. He, the man who isn’t anymore, is given a piggyback ride on the shoulders of a solemn Russian giant of a woman. I watch her eyes as she lumbers toward the medical center. His skin is scattered with small moles. Relief at not being the carrier burns off the people who follow her, like steam.
I am standing in front of the story tent, feeling belly-up. My fingers graze the buttons on my phone. I keep patterning the US country code. I calculate the time difference in my head: it’s the middle of the night in Orange County, and my mother is too far away to save me.
A woman runs to the pool and stands there, searching. It is the woman I saw tanning in the rain, I realize. Her hair is white-blond and wet and her face is Russian, without question, firm and resolved, as if it has always known that this would come. His wife. She looks straight at me.
“He’s dead,” she says, before anyone else says the words. What is there to say to a woman whose husband has just drowned in a pool he easily could have stood up in?
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She does not blame me or any of the other people who should have been watching. “Thank you. We will also die someday.” She reaches behind the bar and takes a huge bottle of vodka, pours a plastic cupful.
The bartender says, “Take the whole thing, please. Take anything you want.”
* * *
—
NO ONE DOES any work the rest of the day. We wander around, gathering wet towels or picking up empty cups, but it’s just movement for movement’s sake. I am thinking about Grams and the cemetery, how she sits on her porch with a fan blowing straight into her face and watches the graves, some dry and hard, some still soft and round, as though a large animal has recently burrowed in and built a nest there. I wonder if they bother to announce the death of a foreigner. Maybe they do so with a little spark of glee—even white people with disposable income can die here, in this place they flock to to snap photos of the blue-black sea, the bay where sunken columns mark the spot where Cleopatra once bathed. They come here to marvel, but sometimes they find out what the people who live here already know: no amount of beauty will keep you alive forever.
I pull my beard down because I’m feeling hot and faint and I don’t at this moment care if I get fired. The fat Russian man did not even exist to me this morning. He was one of hundreds of resort guests whom I may or may not have laid eyes on, but now, by afternoon, he is singular, and he will be in my life forever. I will bring him to bed with me tonight, his facedown form floating in the pool of my mind. He will come to my last year of high school, maybe appear in my college essay, will be one of the stories I tell a beautiful girl I have a crush on to make her love me. I’ll bring him home with me, give him to my mother to share with me—though it would be kind to spare her, to tell her only the easy stories of sun and sea, of kebabs and soft breads, I will poison her with this death and upset her peace, because sometimes a person deserves company.
I find myself looking at each person who passes and thinking, “That guy is going to die,” and “That woman is going to die,” and “That little girl in the buttery pigtails is going to die.” I understand Grams’s interest in the cemetery, in the underworld. She is there to check the names off a list of everyone in town, as diligent as a scientist proving a hypothesis—even the pretty young thing with the baby, even the woman so old it seemed she might just forget to pass on, even the Imam, even the politician’s daughter. She does not tire of the proof. She survives by it, waiting to hear her own name on the loudspeaker, to hover as a ghost on her porch to see her own box lowered into the good earth, to measure, finally, the love she has accrued. I almost look forward to going home tonight and telling her about what I have seen. I imagine being on the receiving end of her offerings—the tulip glass of tea, sugar cubes, sweets.
I think about the dead man and his wife and wonder who is waiting for them in Russia. There must be children, grandchildren even, brothers and sisters, a whole root system beneath that fallen tree. There must be a lot of paperwork involved in transporting a body back home to be buried. Until it is completed, the wife will have to stay in the fake cheer of Club Zeus, trapped on our merry-go-round. Kids perpetually flinging themselves down the waterslide, men revving the Jet Skis so that the vibration jiggles their aging testicles, women sliding the strings of their bikinis to check on the progress of their bronzing, everyone pouring drinks down their gullets, too much to eat at every meal. This is the last place where a person should have to mourn.
* * *
—
THE POOL HAS to be drained. There is no yellow police tape in Turkey, I guess, but people do not need to be told to stay away. The guests make wide circles to avoid the empty blue hole, which is at the center of the complex and impossible to avoid. They have taken on an animal skittishness; their eyes dart and they take short, nervous steps. The hookah bar near the pool gets no customers; the alcohol bar, equally close, is full.
Fact I now know: when one of your fellow holidaymakers dies in your midst, you do not stop drinking the bottomless drinks. Your wristband is paid up for the whole week; it’s only Tuesday and there is no possibility for a refund. You ask for an extra maraschino cherry, raise your plastic glass to the dead man. You admire the female Ukrainian butts all around, perfectly sized and golden brown, the peek of white skin where the thongs shift as the women high-heel saunter. You burn and peel.
* * *
—
THE HIGHER-UPS HAVE asked that everyone stay late in case the police want to question us. I try to call Grams to tell her that I won’t be back for dinner, but she does not answer the phone. When the sky finally darkens, I go out to the swan-supported island, hoping I will be alone. In the corner is a statue of Leto, half clothed, holding her newly born twins on a drifting island. They look happy. They are a family and maybe that is enough. They know who they love. I lie on the tile floor listening to the water lob itself into the pilings. Finally, I dial the number.
“Mom,” I say, as if I am prompting her to be that person.
“Oh, hi, sweetheart.”
When I tell her about the fat man, there is a thick silence. I hope the story hurts her. I want her to share what I am feeling because my pain is part of her job. “Love,” she says. “Oh, love.” But she sounds proud of me. As though she is congratulating me for achieving a long-held goal.
I try again to capture her, to drag her into my sadness. I say, “He was just floating there. His dead body was just floating there.”
There is a pause and I think I may have succeeded. Then she tells me, “My friend Ashtar was over today and he saw that picture of you when you were five, with the tractor. He said you have an old soul. You are stronger than you know.”
What she means is that I am on my own. What she means is that tragedy is also currency. That enlightenment depends on grief. That love grows in soil that has been tilled. For a moment, I wonder if she planned this whole thing, if she prayed to all her gods not for my safety or for my happiness but for me to be deepened, opened, undone so that I might begin to blossom into my truest self.
The water continues to roll into the pilings. The god of the sea must be hungry and sorry. The pilings are stoic and disinterested. After a long time I fall asleep, and sure enough, the fat man joins me there, lying next to me facedown, as if he is waiting for someone to rub sunscreen onto his big freckled back.
* * *
—
A HANDFUL OF FINGERS are in my hair, waking me. They are thin and curious, and I jerk away. A
woman is kneeling beside me. There is enough light to see that it is the dead man’s wife. Her face is hollow, as if she is wearing a mask. Beneath, what could she look like? What dark cavern would I find?
“I must love somebody,” she says.
“I’m sure you do,” I answer, thinking her statement is an existential one.
“No, now.” And she falls into me, her lips on mine, suctioned. I try to pull away, to turn, but she has a hold on me that I can’t break. I am the dock and she is the snail. The dead man’s wife’s tongue is in my mouth now, slipping and searching, and then she has rolled on top of me, and the air goes out of my chest. I am just a place, a heat source, and that is enough for her. Keeping my arms pinned to the floor, she kisses up and down my neck, her tongue in my ear is incredibly loud, like a sudden storm. I can still feel the fat man nearby, floating, and I think maybe the woman can feel him, too. Maybe I am him right now, to her.
I notice that I have sustained a small wound for the dead man’s wife. Like a paper cut somewhere inside me, sharp-edged and very distinct. It reminds me of when my mother would forget to pick me up at school on time, how I’d stand in the semicircle driveway watching the sun sink and worrying that she was dead or trapped someplace, until her car finally glinted into view and my sadness shifted through relief and into trying to soothe her guilt. “Don’t feel bad,” I’d say. “It’s OK. It’s not cold out.”
And then I kiss the dead man’s wife back. Out of resignation? Out of kindness? Because I felt a flutter somewhere deep? Sensing me agree, she lets my arms go and I wrap her up, feather my fingers over the folds of her neck. Her skin and my skin are as different as paper and rubber. I imagine what I know about the Soviet Union and Siberian prisons and Chernobyl crashing up against the dullness of my life like a battering ram. Bread lines, the KGB and nuclear disaster, the endless sunny emptiness of being a teenager in Orange County—they bust open the frozen-banana-stand summers, the pack of blond children learning to sail, the Ferris wheel handholding, the failed marriages, the less-than-perfect mothers, the kids who return after the first year of college and everything they wear, head to toe, is branded UCSB, Harvard, Texas A&M. Gloriously, my life is torn to shreds by the dead man’s wife. None of this is real, says the fucked-up history of her country, her brand-new widowhood. Nothing, it says, has truly ever happened to you.
I kiss the dead man’s wife and let my hands go up her shirt, cup the soft egg sack of her breast. It is the wrongness that feels the best, the fact that I cannot justify this night. I am doing someone a disgusting favor, inadvisable in every way. She is doing me a favor, too. A simple physical pleasure rolls through me.
She does not take my clothes off, maybe because she knows my skinny half-grown body would be ruinous to her fantasy. I keep pushing my shirt up and she gently smooths it back down. I have sunk far enough into this warm wrongness to want it to go all the way, for us both to come up gasping at the end, to not even be able to look each other in the eye. I want to walk around for the rest of the week knowing what I’ve done.
As I am getting ready to dip my hand below the waistband of her denim miniskirt, I hear something shuffle. The dead man’s wife sits up, hears what I hear. She pulls her tank top down but not before I see the tanned folds of her stomach in the moonlight. She has the same stretch marks as my mother, a white roadmap on her sides. I remember pulling at my mother’s skin, asking her why she was tracked like that. “You did that to me,” she told me. “You grew and grew and grew and I had to stretch and stretch and stretch.”
Someone appears on the steps nearby. It’s my boss. I try to gather myself. The blood leaves my crotch.
“The woman has been calling and calling,” Emir says.
“My mother?”
“No, no. Here. Where you are staying.”
I think of Grams on her porch, waiting for someone living or someone dead to appear. She was worried—it never occurred to me that she would miss me. I wish I were on the porch with her, looking out over the graves, the night sea just a shadow in the distance.
Neither the widow nor I explain why we are here on this floating island in the sea. Why we are alone. Maybe I’ll be fired. It’s almost the end anyway. I am leaving in two weeks and Turkey is very far from my home and Grams is old and we are unlikely to ever see each other again. Emir’s hair, thick with gel, shines in the moonlight. He gives me a little headshake as if he knows every terrible thing I will ever do. He must be used to bad holiday behavior, but this is of another order.
The widow turns to me and puts her palm on my forehead as if I am sick. She looks at Emir and her eyes are soft. “Good boy,” she says, coming to my defense.
I wish that I were younger, that I could feel the feeling of being a child with a person who knows how to take care of me. Out of habit, I close my eyes. Her skin is cool and cooler still is the metal of her wedding band. I imagine its counterpart on the finger of the drowned man, his skin swollen around that bright promise. My mother was right: pain is an enzyme and I am softened. A year from now, when a girl asks me if I’ve ever been in love, I will lie and tell her no, but only because I will not know how to explain this night. Love, I want to say to the widow, to Emir, love is an island. But when I open my mouth, the words get tangled. It begins to rain again. Emir clears his throat, trying to prompt us all to return to our separate lives. But when I lean into the widow’s hand, she holds my head up. Below us: all the world’s water.
High Desert
Two thousand years after her people left Jerusalem and eighty years after they left Turkey and fifty years after they left Poland and twenty-nine years after the death of her daughter, the woman walks down the desert road and she feels her body letting go of her.
She is not dying. She is not sick, even. Her body is detaching itself. In fact it is just that her uterus is heavy and falling, but she feels like her body is untying the knots and setting off. The sky is rich blue, clouds puffed, the dirt road dusts her shoes. She looks up at the mountains, the open sky.
The doctor’s secretary says to come on in. Each step the woman feels the falling thing. “Get back in there,” she whispers. “There is no place else to go, I’m sorry to tell you.”
“You aren’t dying,” the doctor says.
“Yes I am,” she tells him. “So are you.”
“Ha,” he says, “ha.”
“Anyway,” the woman prompts him.
“It’s not a big deal. Your uterus is falling, is all. It’s gravity, our old friend.”
“What do we do about it?”
“You won’t need it, I’m guessing?”
“How many women live in your house?” she asks him.
“Plenty, I guess. How many do we need? One is enough.”
* * *
—
THE WOMAN HAD a husband and she had a daughter and they lived on an island in the Caribbean and it’s possible to remember that time as good, easily and simply good. There was lobster and sun and the husband worked in a shop and the daughter went to school and every Friday they lit candles and put their hands on the same kind of bread while the rest of the country waited to pray until Sunday. It was good because it could have gone a different way. Because the parents of the woman and her husband had died and the uncles of the woman and her husband had died and the towns where they had been born were entirely emptied of Jews. But these two did not die and they crossed the ocean when they were still children and they were welcomed to this island and they grew up and met and fell in love and married and worked and had a baby and all they had to do was never look too far east.
But then this daughter, this girl, she went to the beach one day when she was fifteen and she did not come back. Her friends said it was a wave. The sea swallowed her up into its blue blue blue. The sea was hungry, or the gods of the sea were and they never spit the girl back out. There were searches by air and by boat and on land but the woman
knew from the moment she heard the news that the girl would not be found. And when she wasn’t, the husband swam out, too, and let the sea claim him and the woman took a bag of things and set out to find a desert.
* * *
—
THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE features photographs he took himself of Machu Picchu, Ayers Rock, the Great Wall of China. He is wearing a huge turquoise bracelet and his arms are tan. He sees her looking at the photos and says, “There is nowhere like New Mexico, though. We are so lucky to live here.” The woman lives here because it is dry and far above sea level, but she admits that it is beautiful.
“We have two choices,” the doctor tells the woman while she lies down, feet in stirrups, legs up, waiting. “We fashion a kind of plug, made to fit you, which pins the uterus back up inside. You come in once a month and I clean the plug and replace it.”
“That sounds dreamy. I guess we get a lot of chances to get me in this position.”
“Oh, there is no need to feel embarrassed. I do this all day.”
“Option two?”
“Option two, we take the thing out. The whole apparatus.”
Apparatus, the woman thinks. As if it were rusted screws and oxidized iron.
The woman does not want to go home after her appointment so she takes the bus to the mall. She has no intention of buying anything. Unless there are any deals on practical handbags. She needs no more of these, has not needed more for decades. She has many small, sturdy purses with useful pockets nested in her closet. She does not buy them so much as adopts them.
On sale instead are bright lacy panties. Not cotton like she wears. She holds lime-green thong underwear in her hand. They are 75 percent off, today only. They look fertile to her and she finds herself wanting them, needing them, for the possibility of love more than the love itself. She takes four pairs to the counter.
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