Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Your what?”

  “My Baghdad,” Tommy said laughing, knowing it was dumb, savoring the dumbness, and maybe also its truth. “The situation you get into knowing it’s fucked-up but you keep doing it anyway, making it an even bigger disaster. Everyone gets one, but that’s how you learn. It builds character, makes you dirty and real. You know you’re a superpower when you can lose every war and still be a superpower. Maybe you’re a superpower because you can afford to lose them. Same here. There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.”

  “Isn’t that called Facebook?” Mills asked. He had briefly, in high school, created a Facebook profile on the library computer; it must still exist somewhere on a random server, gathering unwanted friendship requests from people he had encountered by accident. People like Tommy Muldoon.

  “Not Facebook. That’s for my parents,” Tommy wheezed. His left eye squinted, as if settling on a mark. “Sometimes when I use Google maps and zoom in on my house, I wish I’d known the exact moment the satellite was taking the picture so I could have climbed up on the roof wearing my father’s orange hunting vest. That way it could have recorded me and shown that I was here, a bright dot scorched on the earth. What good is the Internet if you can’t become something bigger than you started? We can be like saints with our own status updates. Who else will be trusted to record the miracles?” Tommy was beyond reason now, and Mills realized how similarly ridiculous he must have sounded when he was high all of those nights in the city, talking about life like he was living it rather than fleeing it with every hour he spent folded up on a stranger’s couch.

  “You said at the picnic you were an orphan.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, somebody told me that,” Tommy rasped. “Anyway, you should feel lucky you don’t have parents. It’s families that stop people. All they’re good for is guilt. But I’m not going to let my parents stop me. I’ve already got my plans. And it isn’t college. It’s so much more than that. Lisa understands. She made her escape one way and I’ll make mine another. All I need is some cash.”

  “I thought the days of optimism were over,” Mills said, nodding to the bumper sticker.

  Tommy laughed. “For some they are. For some they were over the first day they started. Not me. But everyone becomes an example of something that’s gone wrong.”

  The sound of beeping woke Tommy from his future. Startled, he extinguished his cigarette on the window ledge and bent down to repack his safe. “Pass me a tissue,” he ordered, gesturing to the box of Kleenex on his desk. Tommy bundled the butt in the tissue and buried it in his trash can. Mills heard Pam Muldoon downstairs, her faint voice through the floorboards asking Theo where Tommy was. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily . . .” Theo started singing, his voice like swarming bees.

  A thin column of smoke rose from the trash can. The smell of burning tissue mixed with expired cologne.

  “Your trash is on fire,” Mills said.

  “Shit.” Tommy searched the room for liquid and grabbed the bottle of rubbing alcohol.

  “Not that,” Mills whispered. “You’ll set the whole room on fire.”

  “Good thinking,” Tommy agreed, stomping his foot into the plastic bin. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily . . .” Now both Theo and Pam were singing the nursery rhyme together, their voices competing in rounds. A louder beeping started to echo through the bedroom. Mills scanned the ceiling for a fire alarm, but Tommy hobbled to his desk to ransack the books and papers, his foot stuck in the trash can.

  “It’s not the alarm,” he said. “It’s these stupid watches my dad can’t stop buying me for presents. They keep going off.” He found a high-tech watch with its bands still encased in plastic and smashed it against the desk until the beeping stopped. “Why does he buy me a watch every year? I have a clock on my cell phone.” Mills noticed a picture frame on Tommy’s desk that held a photograph of him and his older sister, their arms wrapped around each other against blue water that might be a pool or an ocean. “Merrily, merrily, merrily . . .” A phone rang downstairs, and booming steps ran to answer it. “Mom?”

  “I like talking to you.” Tommy’s face was only a few inches from his own. Tommy rested his hand on the tip of Mills’s shoulder. “I feel like I can be honest with you. I can’t do that with most of my friends. And now that Lisa’s gone, not with anyone really.”

  Mills returned the smile. Mills hadn’t revealed anything about himself during their one-sided conversation, but Tommy had probably told him more in the last fifteen minutes than he’d told anyone else in a long time. Maybe Mills had mistaken loneliness for maliciousness, two teenage diseases that shared the same symptoms. “I wanted to ask,” Tommy said, the arrogance in his voice gone. “How did you get your tooth like that? Why is it gray?”

  “It’s been like that since I can remember,” Mills said, putting his thumb to it. “The root’s dead. I can’t feel a thing.”

  The bedroom door began to bang.

  “Go away,” Tommy yelled.

  “Open up,” the little boy screamed. “Mom says to come down right now.”

  Tommy dropped his hand from Mills’s shoulder. He lifted his leg from the trash can and stood at the door.

  “What is it? We’re busy.”

  “They found a body,” Theo screamed with delight.

  Mills stared out the window, only half there, trying to remember the next line of the nursery rhyme Theo and his mother had been singing.

  “What? An animal? Not another one of your birds.”

  “No,” Theo swore. “Not an animal. A person. He’s drowned and he’s floating in the bay.”

  CHAPTER 7

  From the causeway, the body looked like a bobbing tire.

  Fishermen often used a tire to mark the location of a shellfish rack in the harbor, the makeshift buoys flossing the deeper channels while serving as perches for gulls bathing in the autumn light. Had it not been for the kayakers, the body might have gone undiscovered for days.

  The kayakers had paddled into Orient Harbor to escape the chop of Gardiners Bay. They careened into the calmer water, nearing the cars that slid like wet pearls across the causeway. When they saw the floating object, the kayakers sailed close enough to make out two swollen arms and the back of a head submerged to its ears. The men quickly rowed to the beach to flag down a passing motorist. By the time they called 911, other cars had stopped on the shoulder. As they waited for the police to arrive, several Orient neighbors crowded along the beach, staring and pointing and shielding their eyes from the glint of the morning haze.

  “What’s happening there?” Gavril asked, glancing through the windshield from the passenger seat. “Should we see?” Beth pulled over to the side of the causeway, coming bumper to bumper with a silver station wagon. As they walked toward the shoreline, Beth noticed Sarakit Herrig eyeing her with a bitten lip.

  “It’s floating wrong,” Karen Norgen said, using her cell phone as a visor. “It’s too still, and it’s not moving with the current. All this fuss, and I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s probably just a lobster crate.”

  “Beth, you just bumped my car,” Sarakit said civilly. “And my kids are inside.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Herrig.” Beth looked over her shoulder and waved apologetically at the three pale faces haunting the station wagon’s windows. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Well, next time try to notice.” Sarakit turned her attention to Gavril, the latest foreign newcomer to marry into the Orient community. With his melanin-deficient skin and un-epicanthic eye folds, he would doubtlessly suffer a far shorter probationary period than Sarakit had. Twenty years ago, when Sarakit first moved to Orient with Ted, Beth remembered neighbors watching her with equal doses of fascination and bewilderment—fascination over the alien beauty of her salamander skin and long black hair; bewilderment a
t her sharp-sawed, staccato accent, which left them straining to comprehend the most rudimentary sentences. Even after she perfected her English, older Orient residents sometimes treated Sarakit Charoenthammawat Herrig like a bizarre Bangkok curio recently cleared by customs control. But Beth found her impressively determined, starting her own travel agency, Pearl Explorations, in Greenport and using her striking appearance as a customized billboard for foreign travel. When the Internet leached away the travel business, Sarakit refused to fold. Instead she expanded, opening Pearl Farms Realty, entering the far more lucrative and less exotic field of real estate. Beth admired the woman’s resourcefulness and didn’t understand why she treated her so coldly in return. Beth tried to disarm her with a smile. Sarakit stared past her at the station wagon.

  “If it’s true what the kayakers said, I don’t want my children to see,” Sarakit murmured. “I don’t want their memories scarred.”

  “See what?” Gavril asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “Those kayakers over there think they found a body,” Sarakit said.

  “In the water?” Beth asked in disbelief. “A person, you mean?”

  “But they’re wrong,” Karen declared. “At least I pray they are. Maybe they’ve been drinking and think it’s funny. They’re from Cutchogue.” Karen seemed to believe the nearby village of Cutchogue was known for its drunken liars.

  Beth stared out across the water and saw an object drifting a hundred feet from shore. The kayakers had taken their boat out again, not bothering to wait for the police, who always took an eternity to dispatch a cruiser from Southold. As they paddled toward the floating tire—at least that’s what it looked like to Beth—she searched the beach, trying to read the faces of the onlookers. Over by the edge of the causeway, she saw Paul’s teenage guest climb down toward the water with Tommy Muldoon. Pam was behind them, trying to order her son back to the house.

  All eyes were on the kayakers as they reached the object. One of the men pushed it with his paddle, and the tire hardly budged.

  “See,” Karen said. “Nothing to be worried about. I was about to have a heart attack. It could have been someone we know.”

  The kayakers didn’t seem as relieved. When one of them leaned over the vessel, what he lifted up had the distinct outline of a human arm.

  A collective gasp was heard across the beach like air through a tunnel. The kayakers shouted toward the shore, but it was far, and the words reached the beach flat and undecipherable.

  “We can’t hear you,” George Morgensen, an Orient retiree, yelled between his palms.

  The kayakers called again. Those who were closest, standing with their bare feet in the water, heard ife, life—no, knife. He needed a knife.

  George dug a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket. “He can have it, but I’m not swimming out there. It’s a matter for the police.”

  Before Beth could stop him, Gavril grabbed the knife from George’s hand. Tommy Muldoon jogged over, and without so much as a nod between them, the two men started walking toward the water.

  “Gavril,” Beth said, stepping forward. “What are you doing?”

  He glanced at her with solemn eyes. Then he lifted his shirt over his head and unbuckled his pants. Tommy stripped as well, two very different body types exposed to the licking wind that pulled fast off the water and rinsed them with its chill—one young and hairless, with each goose bump amplified on his star-white skin, the other hunched and hair-patched and turning a chafing red. Beth was relieved that Gavril had worn boxer shorts and not his skimpy briefs with their broken elastic. Suddenly, her throat tensed and she couldn’t swallow. She felt frightened. Not because of the distance—Gavril was a strong swimmer from all of his summer laps in the pool. And not out of any fear of law enforcement—thanks to their marriage, no xenophobic investigator could threaten to deport him. No, she was frightened because she loved him, and watching his almost naked body take quick, storklike steps in the first contractions of waves made him appear vulnerable to her, something that could be taken away.

  Tommy and Gavril dove into the water and swam with synchronized arm strokes against the stalling current. Pam Muldoon nearly twisted her ankle as she stumbled onto the sand.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” she wailed. She turned to Beth. “What does your husband think he’s doing with my son?” Beth stared back, her jaw fallen open.

  Sarakit intervened. “Pam, he’s trying to help.”

  Pam brought her hand to her mouth, as if to call her son back, but no words came. Like everyone else, she would have to watch as they made their slow progress toward the dark shape in the harbor.

  Beth glanced back at the road, hoping to see a police cruiser. She spotted Paul’s foster kid standing near one of the guardrail poles, pinching his lower lip, looking reluctant to get involved. To Beth he looked like one of those ragged, sand-caked kids more common in southern beach towns, emerging through the dunes and plastic-tangled weeds to eke out a living on the boardwalk, then retreating to their scraped-together lives in the lots behind the tourist billboards. Orient was not that kind of beach town, but some flint in the young man’s face caused Beth to keep her eyes on him. He looked over at her, and they held each other’s stare; when she wiped her eyes, he didn’t turn away.

  The small diamond of her wedding ring sparkled just as the sea sparkled, blades of sun glittering sharper and clearer in the water than in the real sun overhead. Somewhere in all that fractured light, her husband swam. She stood helplessly by, turning her ring with her thumb, as he took stroke after stroke. Why had she waited to tell him she was pregnant? Would he have been so quick to dive into the water if he’d known he was going to be a father—that his responsibilities lay with her onshore?

  Soon she heard a siren blaring in the west. A flash of red light came through the trees of East Marion, and finally a police car pulled up against the guardrail. A young officer climbed out with a radio at his mouth. Behind it came Magdalena’s rusted Volvo, bypassing the cruiser and parking in front of Sarakit’s station wagon.

  “What’s going on out there?” the officer asked, nodding toward the harbor. For a second no one on the shoreline spoke.

  “There might be a body,” George Morgensen finally bristled, perhaps overcompensating for his earlier lack of courage.

  “They went to pull it in,” Sarakit told the officer as she clenched her keys and hurried to her car. “I’m sorry, but my kids,” she said before slamming the door. The officer consulted a voice on the other end of his radio.

  “Beth,” Magdalena called. She had lowered her passenger-side window a crack and craned her mouth toward the opening. Her nurse sat in the shadow of the driver’s seat. “Did they say there was a body?”

  Beth walked over and placed her hand against the glass. “We don’t know yet,” she said. “Gavril went out to help.”

  Magdalena stared up at her in concern. “I don’t believe that. I can’t remember the last time anyone drowned out here.”

  Beth couldn’t remember either. She turned around to locate Gavril, fear and love turning the ground into water and making the harbor seem like the only solid object. The two swimmers had made it to the body.

  She could see Tommy yanking at the arms, but he couldn’t seem to move them. The kayakers pointed their fingers under the surface, and Gavril lifted up, collecting air, and vanished. The body began to twist and finally broke loose, rotating counterclockwise in the current.

  “Oh god, it is a body,” Karen said with fingers trembling against her mouth. “It really is.”

  “It must have been caught on a net or something,” George told the officer. “Why else would they need my knife?”

  “But who is it?” Karen gasped. “And where’s their boat?”

  “Who is it?” Magdalena repeated. Others around Beth did too—who? who?—and then the question died as Gavril and Tommy started swimming back to shore, holding the body at each armpit. The kayakers paddled behind them in an unhurried processi
on. The officer hopped in the water up to his knees and waited with his arm extended. As the body drew closer, she could see a patch of black hair, and then two arms covered in a tattered brown sweater, but still no clue to the identity of the victim. The bystanders on the beach waited, hands folded or strapped over mouths or silently ticking off neighbors they prayed it wouldn’t become.

  In the shallows, Tommy let go of the body and climbed tiredly toward the beach, scaling the bank with wobbly legs. The officer treaded out with swatting arms to finish the job of bringing it to shore.

  Pam gathered her son’s clothes and covered his shoulders with his pants, furiously swabbing him dry.

  “For god’s sake, who is it?” Karen begged.

  Tommy took four heavy breaths and swallowed a final bite of air to bring his voice up. “I don’t know for sure,” he said, panting. “But it looks like Jeff Trader.”

  “Jeff?” George asked and looked at the body for confirmation. Gavril and the officer dragged him onto the sand and turned him over. The face was bloated with skin so blue it looked swathed in refrigerator frost, like a man who had died not by drowning but from prolonged exposure to the cold. The deep, unshaven creases of the cheeks and the fingernails bruised black from years of repair work and the dark, ratty mustache curled over his upper lip confirmed that it was Jeff, the drunk, pink-eyed caretaker of Orient homes.