The Wonder That Was Ours

by Alice Hatcher

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HELEN AND DAVE HAD tasted the most bitter of brews. They started the next morning popping pills behind drawn curtains, less to mute any physical sensation than to dull their awareness of mirrors, the sources and reflections of their shared misery. They left their room in search of food, less to satisfy hunger than to escape the closeness of each other’s company. The pills had only produced a superficial indifference to misery, a dreadful sense of inconsequence and terminal slowing, and distorted the sounds of distant gunshots. The sun appeared filmy and fixed in the unchanging sky, the heat intolerable for having no end.

  “This where we were last night?” Dave stepped onto a pool patio.

  “It looks different.” Helen tired at the effort of speaking. “Without shit everywhere.”

  Her attentions drifted to a masseuse working oil into the bronzed arms of a woman lying face down on a table. At the sound of a gunshot, the woman lifted her head, regarded her surroundings with heavily lidded eyes, and stretched out again beneath a layer of fresh lubricant. Helen touched the sleeve of her borrowed sweater and her mind emptied itself of everything but the memory, now a fantasy, of sunlight upon her bare skin. Dave leaned over to study his reflection on the pool’s surface, transfixed by his own image. Helen considered him for a moment and started walking toward the estate house, relieved, if wearied, when he followed her.

  They ate in the Sugar Mill, beside an open window. Dave flared his nostrils over the tip of a sausage. Helen looked out across the terrace at languid guests sipping iced tea and perusing menus to the sound of gunfire.

  “I grew up around hunters, and this is getting to me,” Dave said, dropping his fork. “Don’t these people have fucking silencers?” He noticed a young woman staring at his bandages and threw his napkin onto his plate. “I’m too hungover for this. I got to find a bathroom.”

  “I’ll wait outside,” Helen said.

  At the edge of the terrace, she settled into a chair and contemplated the slow bleed of hours and days. Her limbs grew heavy, and she might have been sleeping, she realized, when she heard ice cubes hitting glass. A waiter was leaning over her table, filling a goblet with water.

  She waved away a menu. “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  Dave appeared behind the waiter. “Bloody Mary for me.”

  “I don’t know if you should. Your head.”

  Dave scratched his bandages. “Bloody Mary,” he repeated.

  He drew a plastic bottle from his pocket and sat down. As he shook a pill onto his palm, our antennae twisted in doubt. The throbbing in his face would momentarily fade, but nothing would allay his agitation, or his sense that life had suddenly become unfair.

  The unfairness of life, we could hardly dispute. Those of us huddled beneath the hood of the prime minister’s SUV were feeling queasy from the smell of disinfectants and unsettled by Professor Cleave’s behavior. Professor Cleave had become a touch unhinged. In his mind, he was still holding class. At one point, he addressed us—or more accurately, the vents, for only fools would tempt fate by appearing on the dashboard of an insecticidal (but otherwise petty) despot like Graham Douglas. Fortunately, he came to his senses, in the way of people who wake themselves from troubling dreams with their own outbursts. He glanced at the rifle propped between the knees of the bodyguard in the passenger seat and looked into the rearview mirror. The deputy narrowed his eyes. Professor Cleave knew, then, that he’d spoken, and feared his senses had betrayed him. The car had been fumigated, or so he’d been told, and yet he’d just seen an antenna poking from a vent. If reason had defected, he assured himself, it had done so momentarily, in the face of incomprehensible folly.

  When he’d first glimpsed Tremor’s face in the mirror, he’d found it no less despicable for being contorted by anxiety. Against his better judgment, he’d battled disbelief by looking into the mirror again and again. Finally, he’d withdrawn into his mind, only to lapse into ingrained habits. He’d addressed us, madly enough, as “his students,” driving us away from the vents in fear that he’d blown our cover and jeopardized his job.

  We might have been relieved about the latter. However low-fidelity the speakers in Professor Cleave’s cab, there was no music at all in the prime minister’s car. No Calypso Rose. No Skatalites. Not a single beat of DJ Xspec’s Heavy Vibes Hour. Since Butts’s warmth had faded from the car’s leather seats, the speakers had become silent showpieces. Any unmeasured speech was bound to stand out.

  Professor Cleave gripped the steering wheel and forced his attention to his surroundings. Young women sweating into stolen dresses stared sullenly at the car as it passed. Young men carrying bottles of cane liquor spat on the sidewalk. Professor Cleave realized that he recognized none of them, and that any one of them might have murdered Desmond.

  “They’re animals,” the deputy said. “Every single one of them.”

  Professor Cleave tensed, knowing he’d just heard an echo of his own thoughts.

  “They belong in cages,” Graham Douglas said. “We should have used tear gas.”

  We quivered and crawled closer to the vents to learn what we could of the future unfolding before us. In the back of the car, Tremor fingered his holster’s strap. After an uneasy sleep on EZ’s floor, he felt grateful for the windows’ dark tint. He leaned against the glass to watch an old man pushing a shopping cart full of radios up a dirt road. He was staring at the man’s cinched pants when the deputy spoke again.

  “A disgrace to this nation. When children see these things, they become animals, too.”

  “In the future, you won’t see these kinds of people on the streets,” Douglas said. “The police won’t allow it. The economy won’t encourage it.”

  Tremor recalled his father spitting on the floor and decided he’d never cede the strap across his shoulder or let the impress of a gun fade from his hands. For the rest of the ride, he listened to the deputy and Douglas.

  “The U.S. attaché is a spotted lizard.” The deputy trailed his fingers over the top of his own hand.

  “Years ago, when we threatened a strike, he invited me to the Plantations. He offered women and liquor and spoke of being reasonable.”

  “You refused, I presume.”

  “The days of corruption are over,” Douglas said. “That is my answer.”

  “After today, the attaché will make appointments to see you at the Governor’s Mansion. This will be a very different place.”

  “In so many ways. The attaché spoke of American interest in expanding the terminal. He needs to understand that our workers should gain from any proposed schemes.”

  The deputy gazed at a line of concrete sewer pipes. “What was Buttskell’s phrase? ‘The Future is Now.’ A slogan unfulfilled. But these are different times.” He fell silent as the first dead monkeys appeared beside the road.

  Douglas leaned against his window. “They’re covered in sores.”

  “They’ve been shot,” Professor Cleave said. “They’re riddled with bullets.”

  Professor Cleave looked into the rearview mirror and met the hard stare of a man contradicted by a subordinate. He turned his attention back to the road.

  When the Plantations came into view, Douglas pointed to the mercenaries standing at its entrance. “Those men will need to clear the animals from the roadside. The Plantations owns the land, but the roads are public.”

  “I suspect those are the men who shot them,” Professor Cleave stated, bringing the car to a halt before the gate.

  Douglas smoothed his tie. “Then I will insist upon it.”

  A mercenary pulled a surgical mask over his mouth and approached the car. When Professor Cleave lowered his window, the man rested his arm on the door and surveyed the car’s occupants.

  “What’s your business here?”

  Professor Cleave noted the crude insignias inked across the man’s sun-scarred arms. “Prime Minister Douglas has an appointment with the U.S. cultural attaché.”

  The mercenary s
tepped back and waved the car through the gate. When Professor Cleave parked, Douglas remained in his seat. Professor Cleave hesitated and then stepped from the SUV and opened its back door.

  “When we come to the Plantations, you will always remain beside the car,” Douglas said. “Only today, you will follow me inside.”

  Douglas started toward the estate house, and Professor Cleave followed, as unsteady on his feet as Tremor walking in his stiff, oversized shoes. In the lobby, Professor Cleave stood with his back to a wall and studied the veins running through the marble floor tiles.

  “I am here to meet the U.S. attaché,” Douglas said to the concierge.

  The concierge lifted a phone and rested a pen on her lower lip. “Mr. Douglas is here to see the executive manager.”

  Douglas placed his hand on the desk. “I am the prime minister. Here to see the U.S. attaché.”

  The concierge placed the phone on its cradle and turned to a spreadsheet. “The executive manager’s secretary has been informed that you’re here.”

  “This is a disgrace.” Douglas dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief and paced, pausing to mutter at the deputy, “To be addressed as Mr. Douglas. To be treated with such disrespect.”

  Professor Cleave averted his eyes from Douglas and studied an arrangement of photographs on the wall—images of stone towers, wagons loaded with cane, and a flatbed truck parked beneath a banana tree. He squinted at the last photograph, genuinely dumbfounded by his surroundings and Douglas’s behavior. When he turned back to the room, he found Tremor peering into a framed wall mirror, oblivious to the executive manager’s approach. By the time Tremor turned from his reflection, the executive manager was standing before Graham Douglas.

  “It’s a pleasure, Mr. Douglas.” She folded her hands together.

  “Prime Minister Douglas. I understand the former prime minister is staying in the Presidential Suite.”

  “You’re referring to Lyndon Buttskell, the current prime minister.”

  “I am referring to a man who abdicated his position. I need to know what financial arrangements he’s made to retain the suite. It’s my job as prime minister to prevent the misappropriation of public funds.”

  “It will be your job when you are prime minister.”

  Douglas’s face flushed. “Any uncertainties regarding my position should be resolved as quickly as possible. The attaché has privately acknowledged the vote of no confidence in Lyndon Buttskell, but a public statement would do much to restore order.”

  “We’ll address your status during a conference call with our primary stakeholders.”

  “This is a diplomatic meeting.”

  “One that will affect investors. Right now, they need assurances of political stability. An attractive economic climate. The attaché needs to know that you can provide these.”

  “This is extortion,” Douglas said.

  “This is negotiation at a critical time for your country.” The executive manager looked at Tremor. “I was told the police arrested him. Then one of our security associates informed me that he’d appeared on the grounds. As part of your detail. You need to understand what stakeholders are willing to accept.”

  “There’s a man in custody being questioned about the events in Rocky Point.”

  “John Bowden is not my concern. This is the man everyone has seen. Our guests know him as the person who murdered an American.”

  “There is an ongoing investigation—”

  “St. Anne’s image has suffered. The Plantations’ census projections are down. If our meeting is going to be productive, you need to remove him from your service immediately. Beyond that, dispense with the problem as you see fit.”

  Douglas turned to the deputy.

  The deputy turned to Tremor. “Wait near the car.”

  Tremor looked at Professor Cleave, a man in badly polished shoes observing him with disdain and pity, and the executive manager, considering him with the quiet contempt he’d seen on so many strangers’ faces. He imagined her, all of them, backing away at the sight of the gun, doubting him at first and then falling to their knees at the first shot. He pressed his fingers to his temple, lost in a profusion of red and black spots bleeding into one another. He struggled to bring everything into focus—the concierge’s painted hazel eyes, the two bodyguards, and Graham Douglas. Failing, he looked again at Professor Cleave and then reeled across the lobby, past faceless forms and into blinding sunlight.

  He shrank beneath the sky, feeling like a shadow erased by the midday sun. The prime minister’s polished black car now resembled a hearse waiting to convey him to a dark cell strung with a twisted sheet. He looked at the flowers surrounding the house, smelled a sickening perfume masking accelerated rot, and then something of Crazy Mary—exhumed soil embedded in disintegrating fabric and the ferment of moldering fruit. He studied the loops of concertina wire crowning the Plantations’ walls and counted five mercenaries standing beside the front gate. He was close enough to the mercenaries to hear their voices, guttural and cutting, and discern the features of a man in a surgical mask observing his movements.

  He turned from the gate, surveyed an exposed fairway and a line of trees in the distance, lowered his face and walked around the side of the house. Beneath an elevated terrace, he seized at the sight of waiters in white jackets lowering silver pitchers to stare at him, and the American man, recognizable even in bandages, overturning a chair as he struggled to his feet. Tremor touched his gun and stumbled backward, gripping the strap across his chest as if it could give him balance. Then he started running.

  He fled without thought, deafened by the blood rushing in his head. He followed winding sidewalks into a dense grove of trees, to a shaded flagstone path spotted with fractured sunlight. The strap across his shoulder pressed against his blisters and his beret slipped over his eyes. He tripped once and waited for the pounding in his chest to subside. A bird shrieked. He looked over his shoulder, at the path leading back to a polished black hearse, picked himself off the ground and started running again, toward a sliver of blue visible through the trees, drawn by the sea and the promise of drowning.

  By then, the beach had been cleared of sunbathers by accretions of soft mud and shredded orange plastic. Tremor stood at the water’s edge, watching the erratic movements of gulls skimming the ocean’s surface. A wave broke over a distant sandbar. He saw his fate beyond its glittering crest, in unfathomable depths beyond shame and regret.

  “Nowhere to hide and nowhere to go,” he whispered. He tried to remember the woman who’d spoken those words. “Not if you can’t swim.”

  He imagined the moment of letting go, when he slipped beneath the waves, lifted his toes from sand, and allowed an undertow to carry him from shore. The sun would waver and recede beyond a watery ceiling. There would be terror, but there would be forgetting, too, as his thoughts narrowed on his last breath. He crouched down, wrote his names in wet sand with his finger, and watched each of them disappear. He carved Trevor first, and then Prentice, and then Tremor, feeling more disembodied each time an incarnation of himself dissolved.

  He remembered Crazy Mary walking along the shore, dragging a stick along the ground and carving strange symbols in the sand, and children trailing behind her, taunting her. He remembered her shaking beneath a mantle of rags and issuing demands to an empty sky, hoping and grieving in ceaseless cycles. He tried to grasp the kind of love measured by indifference to the world, to all the objects she’d surrendered to the elements in her endless bartering. Despairing, he sat down in the sand and fingered the laces of his shoes, wondering if she’d follow him into darkness when the weight of the gun drew him beneath the waves.

  In a moment of doubt, he tried to lift himself from the ground, only to collapse. Tiny waves crested the sandbar, rolled into shore, and broke against a fragile ridge of sand and shell fragments at his feet. He followed the movement of silt trailing away in tiny riptides and realized he’d exhausted himself. There was nowhere left to run.r />
  Professor Cleave was still running, or at least pacing, looping back and forth across the lobby and ignoring the concierge’s sideways glances. Before going upstairs with Graham Douglas, the deputy had asked him to wait beside the car. The request had been cruel and foolish, less because of the heat or the deputy’s pretenses than the boy’s volatility and his own disgust. Fearing his own temper, Professor Cleave had remained in the lobby to ruminate on a boy who’d stolen so much and gained nothing, and those who’d been foolish enough to enlist him in their ill-advised political campaign. At the far end of the lobby, he paused before a set of French doors and peered into a sunlit room. For a moment, he forgot Tremor’s face and the slouched shoulders of the provisional prime minister. He forgot himself.

  A Persian rug covered all but the edges of a hardwood floor. A chandelier hung from the molded-plaster ceiling. Upon a teak desk inlaid with ivory, a quill yanked from the ass of some poor goose rose from an empty inkwell. An umbrella stand fashioned from an elephant’s hollowed foot stood in a corner. What a room! What a world! None of that mattered to Professor Cleave. He saw only hundreds of books arranged on mahogany shelves, rows of leather spines and the calligraphic curves of embossed titles. As he entered the room, those of us watching him lamented the transient nature of transcendent joy. He drew a book from a shelf and turned it over in his hands, mesmerized and then perplexed by its tight stitching. When he split the gilt sealing its pages and cracked its resistant spine, the scents of glue and bleach filled his nostrils. He replaced the book and examined the stiff spines of other volumes dressed in factory-distressed leather.

  “I have found the only library on St. Anne, and it is a decorative library staged for indolent intellectuals smitten with the trappings of art.”