It was the loon that pulled him out of it. He felt again for the wall, and this time the glass beneath his fingers, the edge of the picture frame, revealed itself for what it was: one of the prized posters.
Graham blinked a few times and stood still. The understanding—that he was in his own bedroom, that he’d been asleep and then had woken, or half-woken—came gradually. He didn’t trust it. He clung to the idea of being trapped, as if it were the reality and the physical world the dream. When finally he was fully awake, he made his way to the bed and climbed in. He didn’t sleep. As the sun rose, the weeping willow outside his window made lacy patterns on his walls, and the light glinted off the glass frames.
After this, he understood that the human brain has the ability to lose its way, like a boy without light.
When Graham was fifteen—long after the episode in his bedroom on Round Lake—he spent a summer in Cadiz, Spain, as an exchange student. He lived in an apartment with a family who had three boys, and he shared a room with the youngest. They ate chocolate and bread for breakfast and spent all day at the beach. Graham had always had a lot of dreams during his scarce sleep, and he’d always remembered them vividly, and one night he woke sweating in the early morning, the light outside a shade short of black, parrots cawing across the building’s courtyard. He woke not peacefully but with the sound of his own screams competing with the cries of the parrots. In the dream that receded too slowly, he was being chased by something terrifying and deadly. The mother of the family, a stout woman with a mustache, held him and shushed him brusquely, and the youngest brother stared in annoyance. This was the summer Graham grew his first white hair. By the time he was twenty, there would be no brown left at all.
Because we met through sleep, people assumed that our troubles were similar, or at least neighbors on the same spectrum. But my sleep troubles and Graham’s were never related, not in symptom or treatment or prognosis. Nothing that helped me could have helped him. The furthest reach of my troubles—the long hours, the heavy pharmaceutical coating that remained after pill-induced sleep, and the terrible humming alertness that followed the shattering of such sleep, like the vibration of a gong after being struck—were insignificant compared to the terrifying unpredictability of extreme parasomnia.
Although it might have seemed as if we were in the same place, working toward the same goal—healthy sleep—we were not at all. By the time we met, Graham knew that no real cure existed for him. I was still hopeful on leaving Detention that the long hours might end. I’d fooled myself into thinking that my insomnia was a sleep disorder, or I’d been fooled by doctors. I don’t sleep well—it’s a problem, yes, but it’s a problem on a par with losing your grocery list before getting to the store. I don’t talk about it, but when it does come up, people are sympathetic. Most people have a passing association with insomnia, and they know it’s an experience they don’t care to repeat. I want to tell them how much worse it can be. Perhaps the closest relative to Graham’s experience is chronic pain—recurrent migraines or crippling arthritis, for example. Living under the thumb not only of the pain itself, but also of the threat of full-on outbreak. People with these conditions know a bit about what it’s like to live as Graham did, in perpetual discomfort and perpetual fear.
THERE WAS A BRASS BELL suspended from the wide trim alongside the Lullaby’s sliding doors, and this was how Lidia announced her presence the first morning I was expected at Stiltsville. She didn’t wait for an answer. The screen’s metal track was chalky and warped, and the door stuck in phases—stut stut stut—as she strong-armed it open.
“Madre de dios,” she said. “You must fix that.”
“It’s on the list,” I said.
I wore a towel around my torso and another around my hair. Frankie was on a colorful patterned rug in the corner of the salon, practicing his monkey jumps. He signed to Lidia, two fingers pointing at his own eyes: Watch! Watch!
“He wants you to watch him,” I said to Lidia.
“Certainly!”
He placed his hands on the rug, fingers splayed and head tucked, then bucked and twisted in one motion. Then he thrust both hands into the air, smiling largely, showing his boxy little teeth. There were times when I could almost hear the sounds he would make if he spoke: Ta-da! he might have said. A few times, in reality, he’d laughed faintly; there had been days when getting him to laugh was my singular objective. There were sounds of pain sometimes, if he skinned a knee or whacked his head, a cry muffled by closed lips. Otherwise, I hadn’t heard him form a word—an intentional, coherent word—in eighteen months, almost half his lifetime, and back then the only words he’d spoken had been mama, dada, flower, doggie, and ball. Just as he’d started to speak words, he’d stopped. We’d dragged him to the doctor, had speech therapists out to the cottage. They’d confirmed there was nothing wrong with his hearing. They said he was making a choice, shutting his mouth when another child would open it. They said there was likely a reason, and they quizzed me about my marriage and about Graham and his parasomnia, which led me to understand that children in difficult homes sometimes go mute—but they settled on no clear explanation.
When I thought of what life would be like for Frankie in school and as an adult if he never started to talk, I felt a fist tighten around my heart.
I asked Lidia to watch him while I dressed. As I retreated to the main berth—this was the first time since we’d moved aboard that I would close the room’s flimsy accordion door—she said, “Move it. You’re running late.”
I pulled on shorts and ran a brush through my hair. I dug through the storage trundle for a crushable straw hat that had belonged to my mother, which I’d adopted as my own long before she died. I dropped a towel and sunscreen into a tote.
Through the thin door, I heard Lidia saying, “Sweet boy, can you say Mimi? Meee-Meee . . .”
I opened the door. “Lidia,” I said, “please don’t.” I’d made the request three or four times since we’d arrived.
“Mama’s right,” she said to Frankie. “No pressure. This isn’t the military, it’s Mimi’s house. Meeee-meee’s house—”
I shut the door.
When we were ready to leave, Lidia handed me a photocopy of a handwritten list. It wasn’t in her handwriting, which was loopy and illegible. This handwriting was tiny and precise, all the letters capitalized, as if shouting in a small voice. There were four stores listed and about thirty items total. From a bait and tackle shop in the Grove, several items. CREAM KROMKA CRAB BONEFISH FLY (4), for example; 1 LB SPOOL CLEAR MONO FILAMENT LINE (ANY BRAND). From a place called the Knitting Garden: 1/2 DOZ 11 MM ENGLISH RIM WOODEN BUTTONS (ASH) and 1/2 DOZ 11 MM COCONUT BUTTONS (UNCARVED), as well as three types and colors of yarn. Beneath the name of the print shop, FAX COPY PRINT, there was only one line: SEE MR. HENRY GALE. The list alone begged the question of what I was getting myself into.
By June in South Florida, it’s more or less as hot as it will remain through the middle of October, when finally the heat relents for a few months. Some women—my childhood friend Sally was one example—were either so accustomed to the heat or so immune to it that they coiffed the way they might if they lived in permanent winter, where the crisp and dry air was more skin- and hair-compliant. Maybe there were products I’d never heard of that could have helped, but for me, being in Miami meant dispensing of makeup, dry-cleaned clothing, and smartly styled hair. I’d inherited my grandmother’s coarse dark curls, and my round face meant a shorter cut would be unflattering, so there was little to be done. In Miami, I secured my hair in a messy bun or ponytail at the nape of my neck, curls fat and frizzy in the humidity. I wore sleeveless shirts and Bermudas or cotton skirts every day. In South Florida, it’s not the intensity of heat or humidity that wears you down—it’s the perseverance of it.
Lidia, who’d mentioned she was running late to meet her power-walkers club, escorted us to the driveway. She hovered in the driver’s-side window as I started the car. I tended to drive with
the windows down and the air-conditioning fully throttled, and always had. It blasted my face as we idled. Up close, Lidia’s skin showed age—deep lines around her mouth, creases down her thin lips, faint speckled scars along her jawbone—though generally she gave the impression of a much younger woman. She squinted at me and adjusted her visor. “You’re all right?” she said, then answered herself. “You’re all right.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Maybe this isn’t a great idea.”
“Maybe not. We’ll give it a shot.”
“I haven’t seen him since they were married,” she said. “Really married, you know—dinner parties and that sort of thing. He was polite enough but didn’t smile. I talked with him once about a bridge he’d designed or engineered or I don’t know what, somewhere up the turnpike.” She smacked the car roof lightly. “Off you go, anyway.”
At the bait and tackle shop, I handed the list to the man behind the counter, who looked surprised not at its existence, but at mine. He ignored Frankie, who stood close at my side. He said, “I was wondering when he’d run out of lures.” The man—his name tag said BILL—had skin that looked carved from rough, wet stone. He didn’t smile, but when he loaded the contents of the list into a bag, he said, “Tell Charlie we miss him out on the flats.” He delivered this line without meeting my eyes, in a way that conveyed he’d said it many times before, without much hope of ever seeing Charlie on the flats again.
At the knitting store, several women sat in a huddle of armchairs, their hands working mechanically and their heads tipped, like a colony of birds. Frankie went to inspect a wall of cubbies filled with brightly dyed yarns heaped in soft figure-eights.
Don’t touch, I signed. I didn’t have to sign, but in public I found myself doing it without thinking, for no other reason than to keep him company.
He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his shorts emphatically, to make a point.
One of the knitting women met me at the counter. When I handed her the list, she appraised me over cat-eye glasses. “Where’s the other guy?” she said.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
She looked back at the list, frowning. “More pea soup angora already? How’s that possible?”
I didn’t answer.
“I’m out of the medium-weight cactus flower. I’ll have it next time.” She started to hand back the list, then stopped and looked at me again. She had pink, gently sagging cheeks and a silver stripe in her black hair. “I find it interesting, this list.” Her tone was confidential. “Sometimes more of one thing, less of another.”
“I saw it for the first time this morning,” I said.
After I paid, Frankie and I walked to the print shop, one block away in a different strip mall. We passed a small, crowded diner, outside of which men and women in suits smoked cigarettes and chatted, waiting for a table. Inside, people sat shoulder to shoulder on benches at stainless steel tables. A few doors down, the print shop was bookended by empty storefronts with FOR LEASE signs in the windows. I was struck by Miami’s easy relationship with contradiction, economic upswing and downturn jumbled together. In other cities, there seemed to be ways to predict which homes would sell, which restaurants would close. Maybe there were Miamians who could predict these things, but whenever I hazarded a guess, I was wrong.
Even after walking only a block, the air-conditioning was a relief. Frankie’s hair was too long for this weather. Dark, leafy chunks were pasted to his forehead, and his cheeks were bright pink. He peered over the counter at the maze of industrial printers being manned by gum-smacking teenagers, their faces glowing with each pass of the developer under the glass.
Mr. Henry Gale was in the back. I asked for him, and the man who emerged was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a voluminous dark beard that covered most of his face—an un-Floridian beard, was my thought. He wore a short-sleeved plaid button-down and long shorts with a surfeit of many-size pockets, an oatmeal-colored waist apron, and leather sandals. This man, with his ruddy cheeks and easy stroll, was clearly not a person one would address as Mister, which furthered my notion that the hermit was formal and old-fashioned.
The man whistled as he navigated the bunker of copiers. “You must be Georgia,” he said in a deep, softly articulated voice. We shook hands. To Frankie, he said, “Little man! How’s it going?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But may I ask who told you I was coming?”
“Riggs said a new runner would be stopping by. You’ve got to explain something to Charlie for me—on the nautilus, I subbed vermillion red for the carmine red he requested.” He searched behind the counter, then pulled up an oversize brown bag. “It’s a little brighter, a little orangey, but I think it works better with the dark water. Make sure to let me know if he doesn’t like it, and I’ll do it again.”
“Who is Riggs?”
“Charlie’s lawyer. He called yesterday.”
“And what is vermillion red?”
He smiled. His teeth were very bright and straight, the teeth of a more sophisticated man. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive—he was—but it was the offhand kind of attractive that’s composed mostly of confidence and cool, with physical attributes an afterthought.
He said, “Look here,” and pulled from the paper bag a stack of prints. He sorted through them gingerly, touching only the corners. The topmost piece, which Henry tipped toward me as he searched, was two things at once: a page from some kind of reference book, covered margin to margin in very small type; and also, superimposed over the type, a precisely drawn portrait of a multicolored jellyfish—or was it a man-of-war? Each tentacle was a different shade of yellow or green, its tendrils rendered painstakingly, some entwined and some jagged, some thin as noodles, some stubby and muscular. The dome of the creature was a soft emerald in color, its crown delicate as a snowflake. It appeared midswim, pushing itself across the page. Henry slipped another picture from the stack: a candy-striped nautilus (I didn’t know what the creature was called at the time), its one visible eye cold but frantic, the rectangular pupil stamped and goatlike. This creature, too, was superimposed over a reference book page.
Beside the stack of prints, Henry placed a paper bag. “The originals,” he said, pushing them toward me.
I opened the bag and leafed through. These portraits were black and white, drawn on oversize book pages in what looked like charcoal pencil. My understanding was that it was Henry’s job to add color to the drawings by hand, then print them on heavier stock using his equipment. Without color, the jellyfish was ruthless and astringent, masterfully depicted and beautiful in its way, but also cold, without the colored version’s hint of playfulness.
“This is the vermillion,” Henry said, pointing to the nautilus’s striped shell. “You see? Orangey.”
I closed the bag of originals and carefully picked up the jellyfish print. Frankie rose on his toes to peer over the edge of the counter. I signed to him, What’s that?
Fish, he signed, one hand swimming in the air in front of his face.
“Jellyfish,” I said. “We’ll look it up.”
We kept a big book of American Sign Language and consulted it daily, sometimes three or four times in an afternoon. We were constantly running up against the limits of a vocabulary acquired on an as-needed basis.
Henry looked back and forth between us. “You like fish, little man?” he said to Frankie, who gave an exaggerated nod. “Check this out.” He thumbed through the prints, then pulled out a drawing of a giant octopus attacking a clipper ship. The ship’s bow was consumed by the water and its stern hovered tenuously above it. Each of its three masts was wrapped in a ropey lavender tentacle lined with fleshy pink suckers. I caught the typed heading of the page beneath the drawing, which read ABSTRACT OF STATE LAWS REGARDING WILLS. I marveled at the technical ability, the artistry, of rendering an animal so vividly on the page. “What do you think of that?” Henry said.
Frankie had ways of making up for his lack of speech. Hi
s eyes devoured the drawing. They spoke for him. He looked up at Henry, cocked his head, pushed out his lower lip, and blinked once—a gesture of pleasure.
Henry came around the counter and handed me two small boxes. “This one goes to Charlie,” he said, indicating the bottom box. “And this one,” he said, pointing to the top box, “goes to the RZ Gallery on LeJeune. Drop it off with the curator—I think her name is Helen? Elena? Something like that.”
“Today?” I said.
“She’s waiting. I can’t leave the shop, and a messenger will take too long.” He put the prints back in the bag and handed it over, along with the bag of originals. He shook my hand again, but this time he cupped mine in both of his for a moment, as if we were old friends. To Frankie, he gave a salute. “Until next time, little man,” he said, and Frankie waved.
FRANKIE PLAYED IN LIDIA’S BACKYARD while I unpacked the car. Since leaving the printer, we’d unloaded the drawings at RZ Gallery—the curator was reading a gossip magazine and wearing a wool turtleneck in the gallery’s biting chill—and spent over an hour at the grocery store. It was one o’clock; Lidia had implored me to get to Stiltsville before noon. I rushed back and forth from the boat to the car, checking on Frankie each time I rounded the corner of the house. He was a passable swimmer for his age, but I didn’t like having him unsupervised around the pool, even for a minute. After several trips, the Zodiac’s aft deck was crowded with bags and boxes, including three twenty-pound bags of ice that each required its own trip. These, I crowded under the captain’s bench to keep out of the sunlight. I fastened down the boxes and bags with bungee cords I’d found in the garage.
At the tackle shop, I’d picked up the only life jacket on the shelf that came close to fitting Frankie. It was purple and had a pink butterfly across the back, and even on the smallest setting rose up around his shoulders. He kept pulling it down, patting his front and shaking his head, as if the foamy presence were a mosquito he could shoo. I stepped onto the boat and pushed off, and in that moment felt the clutch of anxiety.
Sea Creatures Page 4
