The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  I give Agnes my update: “I have breast meningitis, and Izaiah is dead, and also Oliver is babysitting a rat.”

  Agnes chooses the most alarming thing to respond to first. “A rat?”

  “Named Wallace.”

  “Where did he get a rat?”

  I have learned that there are lots of people in the world who need other people to look after the animals they semi-ironically purchased, and I tell Agnes this.

  Agnes is dismayed by the rat’s life resting in Oliver’s hands. She suggests a moment of silence for Izaiah, which we both obey. Then she turns to the matter of my breast meningitis: “I think probably it’s okay.”

  “They’re different sizes,” I tell her.

  “Mine are different sizes,” Agnes says. “Everybody’s are different sizes.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Trust me,” Agnes tells me. Agnes dates women as well as men, and she’s seen a lot more breasts than I have, so I do trust her.

  “Are yours really different sizes?”

  “Yeah,” Agnes says, “a little bit.”

  “Which is bigger?”

  “The left.”

  “Weird,” I say. “Mine is the right.” We share a smile—but then the fear rushes back. “Also though, the right one is warmer than the left.”

  “Warmer?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  Agnes sighs. I can tell that she’s entered her Determination phase, where she solves things. “There’s only one way to do this,” she tells me. “Whip ’em out.”

  I stare at her. “Whip what out?”

  “Your tits,” says Agnes, “take those bad girls out.” She’s already pulling her T-shirt over her head. As I hesitate, she reaches behind her back to unhook her bra. Agnes stands shirtless in my apartment, entirely at ease. She takes her breasts in her hands. “Left one is definitely bigger,” she informs me.

  I pull my tank top off, and then my bra. It feels a little weird, but everything Agnes does is probably for the best. Agnes examines my two breasts. She hefts one in each hand like fruit at a market. “Right one is bigger,” she pronounces, in the same way that she announced her own. Hearing it said in exactly the same way makes it sound less pathological, and more like a classification.

  “And the temperature?” I ask.

  “They’re both equally warm,” Agnes says, decisively. “Now feel mine.”

  I cup Agnes’s tits in sort of the way she’s holding mine, like I’m at a farmers’ market. Agnes’s tits are very small and firmer than mine, so it’s like I’m holding unripe kiwis in my hands. Mine are more like nectarines, ripe. I say this to Agnes (“Nectarines, comma, ripe,”) and she bursts out laughing.

  “No,” she says, “I’m like, a kiwi and a crab apple, and you’re like, a nectarine and…what’s bigger than a nectarine?”

  “A baby cantaloupe,” I suggest, and Agnes shrieks with delight.

  “Yes!” she crows, giving my right tit a healthy squeeze. “A baby cantaloupe!”

  * * *

  —

  THIS IS A BRIEF HISTORY of Wallace the Rat: he arrived in a giant wire cage; his coat was brindled, and he had surprisingly large ears and a tail like an earthworm; I would describe his personality at the time as “quirky,” “inquisitive,” and “occasionally violent”; he liked to roll around in wood shavings; he smelled like musk and allergies and some kind of thick oil, and so did his wood shavings; he liked to be handled, except when he didn’t; he was included in Izaiah’s funeral ceremony run by Oliver and Mason, in which Wallace sat in a bowl while Oliver smudged his backyard with palo santo and attendees gathered in the bald patches of weed and dirt (all attendees were self-selected responders to a public Facebook event called CELEBRATE THE LIFE AND MOURN THE PASSING OF IZAIAH THE IGUANA); he became known for impulsive decision-making, like the moment in which he jumped out of the bowl, off the table, and made a mad dash across the backyard; he became known for the ability to take on a sudden and unexpected bonelessness, as when he squeezed between the lower slats of the backyard fence; he was an opportunist, he was an escape artist, and he was with us for a very brief period altogether, since the time that elapsed between his arrival at Oliver’s and his ignominious departure was thirty-eight hours and six minutes.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER WALLACE’S DISAPPEARANCE, OLIVER IS disconsolate. “I don’t understand,” he says. “It’s like, what’s happening to me?”

  I think about how I might answer the question, and then I think about how Oliver might wish the question to be answered, and those answers diverge so significantly that I don’t say anything at all.

  “I just feel like, the universe is trying to tell me something.” Oliver is sitting very still, arranged in lotus position on the floor of his bedroom. Part of his hair is lying down flat and the other part is sticking straight up. “I think there’s a lesson to be learned here.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Things leave me.” Oliver turns his sad face my way. It’s open and tragic, like one of those flowers that blossoms only at night. Oliver’s loneliness has always just been a feature of him, like his dark hair or his stocky build. It strikes me now that this loneliness has intensified, and everything else I used to notice has receded.

  “I think the universe is telling me that, if I give them a chance, things will leave me,” Oliver says. I want to want to comfort him.

  It’s directly after this conversation that Oliver takes on the starling.

  * * *

  —

  I WAKE UP FROM A dream in which my body is eating itself. Small mouths have opened on my wrists, behind my knees, between armpit and rib. Areas of my body that were once dedicated to conjoining are now dedicated to devouring. It’s three A.M., and I want to talk to Agnes. I want Agnes to tell me the feminist theory behind this dream, or to check me over for tiny mouths, for irregularities, for things that would make me strange and damaged and unlovable. I text Agnes, even knowing she’ll be asleep, but the text doesn’t go through. I try her again—it still doesn’t go through. It would be too crazy to call her right now—even her—so I stay up the rest of the night typing things like “wasting disease” and “consumption” into Google. I start with a regular search, then move on to image search. By the time the sun has come up, I have seen so many horrible things that I’m numb beyond the possibility of actual panic. I fall asleep on the couch and don’t wake up until mid-afternoon, when I’m jarred upright by the sound of someone at my door.

  The door is jiggling—not the knob, but the whole door—and as I stare at it, wide-eyed, a thick envelope comes sliding underneath. It’s wrapped and rewrapped in black electrical tape, and it gets stuck partway. The person on the other side of the door tugs it back and forth, trying to unstick it. It can’t be anyone other than Agnes. A wave of relief washes over me. And I realize it’s not relief because I thought someone was trying to break in, but rather relief because Agnes is the only human on the planet that it’s a relief to see.

  I get up and pull the door open. Agnes is kneeling on the landing, staring up at me. She looks briefly terrified, and then she smiles. “Oh hey,” she says, and her relief sounds much more like she thought maybe I’d be an undercover government official.

  “Hey,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “I thought you’d be at work.”

  “No, I had a weird dream and I stayed up all night and—never mind. Did you call me?”

  “No,” Agnes says, “that’s the thing, that’s why I was leaving you a letter. I feel like cell phones aren’t safe. I threw mine away.”

  “You what?”

  “Yeah, and then I shut down my email account. I think handwritten is the only way you can really be safe and even then I wrapped my letter in tape so you would know if anyone had tampered with it.”

 
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.” Agnes doesn’t look like she slept last night either. “What’s the letter say?”

  “Mostly what I just said.”

  Agnes doesn’t look like she’s slept in a while, actually.

  “You should come in,” I say. “I’ll make us smoothies.”

  Agnes comes in and closes the door behind her. Then she locks it. She sits on the counter while I put things in a blender. Bananas, cinnamon, milk—whatever’s in the fridge, I just sort of add it into the blender—rice, yogurt, I hesitate over a container of pitted olives, but Agnes says, “Go for it,” so I put in a few pitted olives.

  “So,” I say, because Agnes is uncharacteristically quiet, “you don’t have a cell or email anymore?”

  She shakes her head no, and tells me the Edward Snowden documentary really got her concerned. I ask if there’s something specific she’s worried the government might discover about her, and she sighs and says, “Information in general is specifically dangerous.” Then she asks me how I am, and I tell her what I’ve learned about wasting diseases.

  I want her to feel better, but I don’t know how to help. Although Agnes is, by nature, someone my mother would call “particular,” I’ve never seen her like this. I want to ask if she’s okay, but I don’t feel okay either, so I’m not sure what I’d do if she said no. Instead, I ask her if she feels better now that she isn’t encumbered by email and a phone.

  Agnes says, “If it isn’t this, it’ll be something else, won’t it. I mean, drones. There’s drones. You can’t even see them but they’re up in the sky.” She looks exhausted. She leans her head on one hand, and sips her smoothie very slowly. I sip my own. It’s thick and brackish, like pond water. That’s probably the olive salt. I ask Agnes if she wants me to make her a different smoothie, but she shakes her head, and then just keeps shaking it, frowning down at her pond water as if she’s trying to determine how many people are watching her drink it.

  * * *

  —

  THE STARLING IS NAMED SEBASTIAN. He stalks around his cage like a malfunctioning movie, in staccato jerks and pauses, except for the sudden liquid lunge to take a chunk out of your nearest body part. He shits on everything. The bottom of his cage is covered in newspaper, and it’s white with shit. This could also be because Oliver hasn’t changed it yet. Oliver thinks that Sebastian thrives on familiarity, and that it would be too much to change both ownership and newspaper in the same period of time. I keep forgetting his name. I just think of him as “the Nasty Bird.”

  Oliver is bird-sitting for Gina, who is out of town. Gina is at an artist residency in someplace like Mongolia or Berlin or Venice, where she is writing small sad songs on a ukulele and then playing the songs from inside an installation designed to look like a vagina. Or she is collecting paper scraps and creating a collage where the scraps are glued together by her tears as she listens to NPR reports of crimes against women in Afghanistan. Or she is digging shallow symbolic graves with her bare hands, and later photos of her candy-red nails, rimmed by dark soil, will pop up innocently on Instagram. Gina is doing any and every one of those things.

  What Sebastian is doing, is pooping.

  The other thing about Sebastian is that he talks. Apparently starlings can learn and repeat language, which was not something I knew prior to the Nasty Bird. He already knows how to say “hello” and “how was your day,” which are things Gina taught him. He also likes to say, “Go fuck!” If you come in and say, “Good morning, Sebastian,” chances are good that he will reply, “Go fuck!” These are the moments in which I almost like him. They are brief moments, but they are real. And then Sebastian clacks his beak and prepares another thick caulk-white stream of shit, and we’re back to square one.

  Oliver is entranced by Sebastian. The week that Sebastian arrives, Oliver organizes a Bird Viewing through similar methods to his Iguana Viewing and Iguana Funeral, except this time he also places an ad on Craigslist. I attend the Bird Viewing long enough to witness the arrival of several leather daddies, a coke dealer, and three girls who seem like confused hookers—apparently they didn’t think he meant a real bird—before I slip out into the night.

  It’s a hard week for me, because I can’t just text or call Agnes whenever the world seems like it’s too much, which is sort of how it seems all the time. I drop by Agnes’s apartment multiple times, but Agnes doesn’t seem to be in, although she leaves me small things outside her door—a note saying Gone fishing (which I know doesn’t mean she’s actually fishing), a Virgen de Guadalupe candle, a Snickers bar. It’s possible that she means to convey pieces of coded information with each offering, but I can’t guess what they are, so I just eat the Snickers on the walk back to my place, and I put the Virgen candle by my bed and light it.

  Oliver and I are arguing more, as well. By the second week of Sebastian’s residency, we can’t be in the same room without fighting. The fights are like brief explosions, followed by a chain of apologies that happen like smaller explosions, leading back up to a large explosion again. Oliver wants to fight about how uninterested in Sebastian I am; I want to fight about how much Sebastian smells and how loud he is. Oliver wants to fight about my lack of attendance at the event he curated wherein everybody sat around Sebastian’s cage and read Poe’s “The Raven” out loud together; I want to fight about Oliver’s lack of empathy for how lost I am without Agnes. Oliver wants to fight about how I should be that lost without him; I suddenly don’t want to fight anymore. Then Oliver apologizes, then I apologize, then Oliver apologizes for needing me to apologize, then he asks me if I’m leaving him and we start fighting again.

  Gina Skypes Oliver soon after one of these fights. She tells him that she’s been offered an extension of her artist residency, and she’s going to take it. She asks if Oliver will keep watching Sebastian, and I hear him say that he will, and then he asks how long the extension is.

  “Well,” Gina says, “it’s a funny thing. It’s like, six months? With the option of another six, if I can get a visa?”

  “Oh,” Oliver says. He processes. He processes. “Oh. A visa? Are you…like…emigrating?”

  Gina laughs. It’s a light airy laugh, even over Skype. “I mean I think that word is a little bit problematic? It sort of co-opts a history of oppression, which is what my work is about, actually?”

  “Oh,” Oliver says. “I’m sorry. But like…are you coming back?”

  “I think it’s important to finish my project,” Gina says thoughtfully, “and art takes time, I know you know that, art takes whatever time it takes.”

  It’s at that point that I go take a shower. I’m still in the shower when Oliver bursts in without knocking, which he knows I hate.

  “She’s emigrating,” he says.

  “What are you gonna do with Sebastian?” I ask.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!” Oliver sits on the closed toilet seat, head in his hands. I can see his shape through the shower curtain.

  “Tell Gina you’re letting him go if she doesn’t come get him,” I suggest.

  “I can’t do that,” Oliver says, horrified. Then: “Can I do that?”

  “I mean, I’m not going to stop you.” I turn off the shower and stick my hand around the curtain so he can put a towel in it. I know this tends to upset him, since he believes in the healthy nudity shared by couples who are comfortable around each other. I believe that if anybody sees my body, they will either notice a deformity that I haven’t yet seen, or the weight of their gaze will instantly create a deformity that wasn’t there before. The only time I have felt differently about this, was when Agnes was weighing my already-deformed tits in her capable hands.

  I wait for Oliver to have feelings about my towel request, but he’s so upset by the starling situation that he just gives me the towel. “I can’t let Sebastian go,” he says, pacing a little. “He might die. He might get eaten by something. He might
be lonely.”

  “He’s a bird,” I say. “He might be happier out in the wild, with the privilege of having all those options.”

  “She said she was coming back.” Oliver is panicking. I rub his shoulder. “I mean…six months? A year? I thought, like…a week, I could keep him alive for a week more, or two weeks, but…”

  I want to say something comforting, but instead I hear myself asking: “Why do you volunteer to pet-sit?”

  “My friends need help,” Oliver says into his cupped hands. “I like to help.”

  “Okay, but aren’t there other friends—ones who already have pets—who could help? I mean—I feel like maybe it’s just science, like: there are people with longer attention spans, and they have pets, and there are people with shorter attention spans, and they don’t.”

  “Which one am I?” Oliver asks, genuinely asks. And then he does the math fully, and his face folds in on itself, as if I’ve kicked him.

  “That’s not a bad thing,” I hasten to say. “It’s just a thing! I mean, I don’t have pets.”

  “You don’t want to take care of things,” Oliver says flatly. “You don’t even want to take care of people.”

  “What?” I come careening to a halt, realizing we’ve taken one of those Oliver-y turns in the conversation, and now I’m out of my depth. “Wait, that’s not true.”

  “Oh no? You don’t ask me about my feelings. And when I tell you, you change the subject. And you don’t feel sad when I’m sad, and you don’t want me to be sad. And when people have small children, you don’t want to hold them!”

  I’m torn between outrage and a general agreement with everything Oliver has said. I settle for: “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to take care of people!”

  “Oh no?” Oliver is so upset that his whole body is shaking, his balled fists and tight shoulders are shaking. “Then who do you want to take care of!”