by David Jurk
When she reached the hotel – an old clapboard inn – she hesitated for a few moments, deciding whether she should go in. Of the six of them, two had already died, and not bravely, but with panic and fear. She was quietly ashamed for them as they spread anguish to the others, who themselves were showing the early signs. And now, the last were down, struggling to breathe, burning with fever. She could walk elsewhere, she thought, enjoy the wind and put off entering the inn - but as she felt the first of the rain promised by the arriving squall, she chided herself; she had not only responsibility to herself to die well, but responsibility to assist the others. Hai, she thought, what would her mother tell her? In selfishness is unworthiness, Haruko.
Smiling at the memory of her mother’s voice, she entered, assaulted immediately with the sounds and smells of the dying – gasping, tortured breaths of lungs being drowned, accompanied by the stench of vomit and diarrhea. She went in turn to each of the sleeping rooms, offering water, laying cool washcloths on feverish faces, meeting the anguish in their eyes with serenity, with support. She did not temper the truth – what was the point of that? – but told each that their time of suffering was soon to be over. Then she asked each in turn, softly, whether they wished to be relieved of it. Of the three, only Fujita Isao grunted his agreement, his eyes black and empty. She nodded wordlessly, helped him raise his head from the pillow, and gave him one of the pills she’d acquired at the chemist’s shop down the street. He choked on the water, but managed to get the pill down his throat, and she sat with him, stroking his head with the cloth until his eyes closed and the heaving of his chest ceased.
A flicker of fear passed through her then, followed by a sudden hope that rose in her breast; perhaps I am immune – I’ve had no symptoms. But she snorted with contempt at this weakness and rose to tend to the others.
During the next several hours, as the last two slowly died, she broke the tediousness by turning on the radio and listening for a while to the reports coming from New Zealand. How unthinkable that people should carry on in such fashion! There was talk of riots and great violence; people believing they could escape the contagion by burning the sick in their homes. Some, knowing they would die and knowing that they had yet some short period of life left to them went on rampages of unrestrained evil – raping and murdering. What manner of human beings were these that, released from their future, chose to behave as madmen? Was this inherent in their race, she wondered, or had they been raised in a different place, with different people, would they then behave as civilized beings? She considered this question carefully for a moment and decided that the cherry tree was the cherry tree; plant it here or there, it might grow slightly better or worse, but it would always be a cherry tree. And a weedy, poisonous ivy was an ivy; plant it in the finest soil, it was still a thing of torment. She shook her head in dismay, turning off the news, unwilling to hear more of this embarrassment.
By that evening, the remaining two had died, each in their turn, and after she had tucked the sheets carefully over the bodies, she went into the little kitchen and prepared a light meal for herself. She sat in the gathering darkness slowly eating, wondering how her parents and brother were faring in Tokyo. They are probably all dead by now, she thought, and took a deep breath of sadness. With that, she felt a sudden catch in her chest, a sharp restriction like a wire being drawn tight. Her eyes widened in surprise, then she relaxed, settling back against the chair. See, she told herself, you are no different.
She smiled and rose, returning to the kitchen where she washed her dishes and set them in the strainer next to the sink. Pouring a small glass of sake, she walked back to the outer room and sat facing the window that looked out over the ocean. The night had cleared, and the stars were endless in number, bright as diamonds. The palm trees still lashed about in the strong wind, and she knew the morning would bring the clean smell of land and sea washed fresh by the squall. The moon, one day past full, illuminated the heavens.
She took pen and paper and delicately, with graceful hand, wrote what she’d been contemplating for days. Of course, she would have preferred there be time for her to create her own jisei, but one did not control such things; the days were dealt to you like cards from a deck, how you played them in turn was what mattered.
And in truth, could she have surpassed this with her own creation? What could be more perfect in this circumstance than Basho?
On a journey, ill;
My dream wanders
Over a withered moor.
Finishing the writing, she pondered the words again, nodding her appreciation at the beauty of the master’s thoughts. Life was indeed a dream, and now it was time to return to the wholeness from which all such dreams were born. She laid the paper gently on an end table, set the pen delicately across it, considered the angle at which the pen should rest, and was satisfied.
Sitting back, for a moment she closed her eyes, then reached for the pill, placed it on her tongue and sipped it down her throat with the sake. She set the glass on the table next to her and laid her head back against the soft upholstery of the chair, her eyes intent on the stars. For some time, she watched them, until at last she felt the dark fog reaching for her.
Mother, she thought, I am coming.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HAVING JUST SAILED forty-three hundred kilometers across the Pacific, I was now completely incapable of crossing the two hundred meters of bay that separated me from land. In those first moments after mooring, the eagerness to be off the boat, to set foot on solid ground after a month on the sea, was overwhelming. Yet as I began to gather together what I’d need to go ashore, an uneasiness grew in me. Something seemed eerily wrong; the very air drummed against me with a brooding, unnatural emptiness. It wasn’t that there was silence; the sounds of birds rose all around me – gulls squabbling, piercing crows of wild roosters, the whistling screams of mynas; the racket from them produced a cacophonous bedlam far noisier than what I remembered it being. But the underlying evidence of people was completely absent – there were no sounds of boats, no shouts or laughter on the beach or around the hotel, no music, no horns in the distance, nothing. We were moored less than a kilometer from the airport and hardly further than that from Lihue, the largest town on Kauai, yet I heard no aircraft, no sounds of engines or traffic, background hum of the city. It was as if I’d come not to the real Kauai but to some facsimile of it from which all resonance of man had been exorcised.
But civilization’s infrastructure – the buildings and sheds, the walkways and roads, the golf course and all the rest – still remained, as if expectant, certain of an eventual return. I stopped midway through packing, leaving all the gear I’d been stuffing into a backpack lying on a bunk and took up the binoculars and went to the deck. If I’d learned anything from a month at sea, it was an instinct to be cautious, to evaluate before committing – to try not to make mistakes that could kill me.
Nawiliwili Bay, this harbor, was neatly split; to the west, the working harbor with its marine terminal for cruise ships and pleasure boats and all the trappings that existed to support it; to the east, the Marriott resort on Kalapaki Beach, tourist shops and manicured grounds. And at the very eastern edge, rows of houses were lined along the cliff, perhaps two dozen in all. After surveying the whole of it for a few minutes, I lifted the glasses to my eyes and swung first toward the beach and the hotel.
The beach itself seemed to be pocketed with holes and I puzzled over it until I realized they were the remains of fires, circular pits that held obvious remains of cooking fires. And trash was literally everywhere; towels, heaps of clothing, blankets, paper – blown into compressed jams against anything standing. There appeared to be makeshift tents; blankets arranged in rough tepee-shaped pyramids, hung over wooden lounge chairs laid on their side, the trailing edges held down with mounds of sand or rocks. One was spectacularly large, ingeniously constructed over a volleyball net, blankets attached together somehow to form a large canopy, the sides left open. Beach
furniture was set underneath, some of which held shapeless forms. I slowly lowered the glasses as I realized these shapeless mounds were bodies. I wondered at this; why bring the sick outside, build a shelter on the beach – why not leave them in the hotel? And looking at the darkened hotel, I understood; at some point they’d lost power and once that happened, air conditioning would’ve become a fond memory, and cooling would again be a function of airflow, not refrigeration. And there would be one other benefit – the smell of death would be kept outside.
I focused on the hotel itself and at first, aside from an absence of activity and light, it didn’t seem markedly affected. There was no evidence of fire or destruction, as far as I could tell, but a general air of abandonment hung over everything like a fog. Many of the sliding glass doors to the patios and lanais stood open, windows as well, gauzy curtains billowing outward obscenely, like skirts being lifted. On the main floor, along the courtyard wall, many of the windows were broken, jagged shards of glass still standing in the frames. Not for entry, I thought, for ventilation.
I could see very little within the hotel grounds themselves; lush foliage had been grown as a perimeter, both to provide a level of privacy to guests – especially for those swimming at the vast pool complex within the grounds – and to enhance the Polynesian feel of the hotel itself, with the palms and huge tree-leaf philodendrons, the Norfolk pines, African Tulip trees with their flaming red flowers – and all the other mélange of flora. It was a botanical wonderland, and now it served to shield the grounds of the hotel from view. What I could see, from here, were portions of the normally manicured lawns, now raggedly overgrown, populated with an ignominious array of wild chickens and pigs, rooting for food.
The scene in its totality struck me as harshly as pictures I’d seen of Hiroshima after the bomb. Not in terms of destruction obviously, but in terms of sheer change, the jolting contrast between before and now. My memories of this pristine bay and lovely hotel, the vibrancy, the color and light and sounds, the sheer tropical lushness – all combined together in the joy of being with Rachel in this paradise; it just stood in such flagrant contrast to the deserted, decaying, slow surrender before me. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of emptiness and loss. I suppose, had I ever visited and walked among the lovely parks and boulevards of Hiroshima before the bomb I would look upon this scene with some level of gratitude that there was as much left as there was. But I hadn’t, and all I could feel was the wantonness of its loss.
These dark thoughts were intruded upon by a sound so normal – yet so unexpected - that for several moments it existed only in the periphery of my consciousness. Then abruptly, I realized that I was listening to a boat motor. I lowered the binoculars, searching, and finally spotted movement in the inner harbor. A boat was backing from a slip in the marina, perhaps a half-kilometer distant. I heard the motor roar, slow, then roar again. I put the glasses back to my eyes, focused them on the boat, and noticed what I’d failed to see earlier - the marina, with the exception of this lone boat now moving, was completely empty.
Well, of course; people with boats had done what I had. Fearing the contagion sweeping across Kauai, they’d come here to the marina and escaped to sea, to isolation and the hope of safety. Only these wouldn’t have been cruising boats – I recalled a marina packed with fishing boats, designed more for battling tuna than living aboard. There would be some manner of living accommodations probably, but I couldn’t imagine trying an ocean passage. But desperate times, I knew, brought desperate measures.
And like most of the fishing boats, the engine I was hearing was no electric; this was a combustion motor, running on some sort of fuel; fuel that sooner or later would run dry. Watching it through the binoculars, I saw that it was fully loaded, bristling with rods and downriggers. Perhaps 10 meters long, it seemed comically ungainly with its high navigation tower.
The boat had backed free of the slip and began maneuvering out of the harbor, needing only to thread its way past the rows of empty slips framed by the lattice of docks providing access to them. It should have been an easy run, but it was clear from the hesitation and the sounds of the engine being slipped in and out of gear, that either there were mechanical problems or a very inexperienced hand at the helm. Still, it managed to work its way into the channel leading out of the inner harbor and lined itself up to point directly at Windswept. I saw the churn of wash at her stern a second before the sound of hard acceleration echoed to me off the water.
I stood quite still, uncertain what I ought to do. Here were the first living humans I’d seen in a month. I had no reason to fear them or suspect them of ill intent but no reason to trust them, either. I ducked quickly below and pulled the Winchester from under the settee cushion, checked that the clip was full and racked a shell into the chamber. Coming back out into the cockpit, I kept it low, then laid it gently onto a seat. Watching the boat, I simply stood and waited.
When it had come within fifty meters, the engine dropped abruptly to idle and the boat, heavy and wide-beamed, yawed sluggishly, rocking up and over its own wake and stopped dead in the water. Again the engine roared and it advanced ten meters further before another stop, and finally a third surge; its wallowing progress bringing it within ten meters of us, where it stayed finally, rocking awkwardly in the ripples of the bay.
I could see the dark profiles of two men in the tower, looming five meters above me. They were obscured in shadow, faces hidden. I stood silently and waited, unmoving, and after a few moments, one of the men moved to the railing, coming clearly into view.
He wore a Hawaiian shirt, printed with pea green lilies. It was unbuttoned, revealing his ample gut, red with sunburn. He looked fiftyish I thought, though with his ruddy, unshaven face I might have been off by a decade in either direction. Perched on his head was a farcical captain’s cap, something for a child from a toy store; shiny black plastic bill, gold braid and an anchor patch in front.
We stood contemplating each other for what seemed a long time. Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke; it occurred to me at once that he was drunk. His voice was loud, incongruously high-pitched, vowels drawn out. Texas? Maybe Louisiana.
“How y’all?”
“Good.” I said. “You?”
“Makin’ it, man, jes’ makin’ it.”
“Where is everyone?” I asked. He stared at me a while before speaking.
“Y’all from around here?”
“No,” I said. “I just got here. Shocked to see everything so abandoned. What’s happened to everyone?”
He put on a show of mocking my words. “What’s happened? The got-dammed plague is what’s happened.” He paused, pushed up the bill of the comical little hat with his pinky finger. “Where you been?”
I stared at him for a moment, considering.
“At sea,” I replied finally, “for a month. Lost my radio antenna, and the internet dropped.”
He laughed without humor. “Well, shit man, ya’ missed all the news. Ain’t no more internet. Ain’t no more nothin’.”
“Where is everyone?”
Mocking again, a quick smile at the other man, still hidden in shadow. “Everyone is gone, man. Gone if they had a boat, dead as a mother fucker if they didn’t.”
I watched as he fiddled with the toy captain’s hat.
“The authorities?” I asked. “The government? What’s happened to…”
He interrupted me. “Told ya, ain’t nobody. Ain’t no ‘lectric nowhere and no fuckin’ food, neither.”
He took his time, making a show of running his eyes along Windswept.
He pursed his lips, glancing briefly at the hidden man. “Y’all say ya been to sea? From where, man?”
“San Diego,” I replied evenly. His eyes widened.
“Woo-ee! Shit, man, must be a hell of a boat. Must have some real gear on it, come all that way.”
I didn’t answer him and for some reason that seemed to irritate him. His smile faded into a scowl and he leered down at me.
He had an air of sudden impatience, of growing belligerence.
“Got any diesel?” It wasn’t a question as much as it was a demand.
I shook my head. “I don’t use fuel.”
“Yeah?” He paused, then leaned out over the railing.
“But you use food, doncha?” he said harshly. “And water. Got some a’ that?”
The air between us changed, became charged with something.
I briefly dropped my eyes to the rifle, then looked back at him, considered where things would go from here. Would I have shared water with them if it had been someone else? I wanted to think so. But this wasn’t someone else.
“No,” I answered slowly. “No more than I need for myself.”
“That don’t make no sense. Boat like that, bet you got plenty a both.”
I waited.
“You sick?” he asked suddenly.
“I told you,” I replied evenly. “I’ve been out on the ocean – alone – for a month. If I’d gotten infected on the mainland, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
“So you say.” He paused. “But we ain’t in no position to take chances.”
He reached for something, slowly pulled it out and pointed it at me. It was a quite substantial flare pistol, single shot. He was at least fifteen meters from me, both boats rocking somewhat in the tide. I suppose if he were stone sober and had practiced shooting it at a target, he could’ve done some damage to me. But he certainly could hit Windswept, and that was another matter entirely – she could easily be set aflame.
His belligerence hardened, became threatening. The high-pitched voice dropped an octave and he barked at me, commanding, making me wonder if he’d been a cop before all this.
“Now you just jump your ass into that harbor,” he growled. “Swim anywhere ya wanna.” He thrust the flare gun toward me, sweeping it the length of Windswept. “Cause we’re takin’ the sum bitch.”
