The Dark Atoll

by Marilyn Foxworthy

  Christie said, “But nobody slapped me. If I do something bad, then there are consequences.”

  I said, “First of all, choosing to eat a grape isn’t bad. In fact, making a choice isn’t bad. You might choose to do something bad but it’s the thing you do, not the fact that you made a particular choice that was bad. But ‘bad’ just means that the consequences of what you did weren’t something you wanted. It’s more complicated than that because you have to consider the consequences to everyone, not just yourself, and sometimes the consequences can seem bad even if what you did wasn’t bad. But let’s keep it really simple for now. We make a choice, then we do something, then something happens because of it. We make a choice, we behave in a particular way based on the choice, and there are consequences for the behavior.”

  We paused for a few seconds and I continued, “Allie told me that I would have to fight for the chance to be safe. I decided that I would fight. My immediate behavior was to travel to the trade village. The consequence of that was that Coach and the others chose to fight me. The behavior was that one of them attacked me. The consequence was that I killed him. Then a second guy chose to attack me, and he did it and the consequence was that he was killed too. Finally, Coach chose to put a stop to it. His behavior was that he gave us a boat and a house. The consequence was that we left him in peace. Allie demanded that they give you to us, and the consequence of her choosing to do that was that they gave you to us. You could look at my choices and my behaviors and the consequences of all of them, but they’re all intertwined, and one follows from another. So, we keep it simple. You drowned yourself. I brought you back to life. I fought at the village and we have a house and each other. Allie caught some fish, I stomped on one of them, and you explained how our lives can be OK now. Do you see?”

  Christie said, “Consequences flow from behavior. Behavior comes from choices. Or from reactions that we don’t know that we are choosing. And those consequences may become behaviors that result in further consequences.”

  I said, “So, when you chose a grape, the consequences were that you got another grape. But they could have been different. You could have eaten a grape and the consequences could have been that you didn’t have any more grapes. You could have chosen not to eat a grape and the consequences could have been that you got hungry and dehydrated. The point is that there are always consequences, good, bad, or neutral.”

  CHAPTER Eleven - Sand and Water

  We lay there for quite a while. Wouldn’t it have been great if the sun had come out. We hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time. I heard about a drought in California once where it finally rained, and six-year-old kids didn’t know what was happening and got scared because they had never seen rain before. It reminded me to ask about another local mystery.

  I said, “The Breeders, do they have children?”

  Allie said, “No. No one has children. Maybe one every few years but lots of times it doesn’t survive.”

  I asked, “Then why are they called Breeders?”

  Allie said, “Because they do sex between boys and girls. They could have children, but they don’t. When we first came here, the breeders went together and said that they would have children, but no one ever did. Some of them tried to make families with each other but they didn’t last. Some said that they were going to try to stay together, like their parents tried to do but that didn’t work either. After a while, it just meant boys who liked girls and girls who liked boys.”

  I said, “So there are no families here at all?”

  Allie explained that no, there weren’t. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was rare even before the cataclysm, but I had grown up in a family and all of my aunts and uncles had families and I had cousins, so I thought it was pretty normal. I knew that in reality it wasn’t.

  Pretty soon, both Allie and Christie were lying against my side, hugging me as we lie there. I kept thinking about getting the house ready, but I forced myself to remember that it wasn’t really important. And the girls didn’t really care if it got done today or a week or even a year from now. They might not even know if it was a week or a year from now. I had some hope that maybe they would start to understand the passage of time again but even that wasn’t very important. The only reason for getting the house ready was if we would be more comfortable that way.

  And then Allie said, “It’s going to rain,” and she pointed toward a darkening part of the sky.

  Suddenly, I had a reason to do something other than relax on the beach under the permanent heavy overcast. The rain could go on for days and getting inside would be a whole lot more comfortable than being out here like Allie and I had been for a week or so during the last storm.

  I cheerfully told the girls that we should do what we could to start keeping house here and they reacted as if it sounded like great fun. My first thought was to check the tank that collected rainwater and provided some running water for the house. Naturally, household repairs and even construction were familiar to me; we’d done plenty of it after the cataclysm. A lot of the repairs and maintenance at the bunkers was handled by Norg but on the other islands it had been up to me and my dad to do what we could for people.

  The tank wasn’t in that bad of shape. There was a lot debris in the collector. The filters kept it from getting into the pipes, but the system was completely clogged. I crawled down into the tank and scooped the rotting vegetation out with my hands. There weren’t any animals or birds, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I guess when I was a kid, I would have felt disgusted by the thought of climbing naked into a filthy water, tank but I’d been through much worse. I wasn’t afraid of catching any diseases from it.

  I had the girls turn the faucets to fully open positions and we verified that the drains were working. It would take a long time to completely flush the system if we had to empty the entire tank through the pipes and wait for it to fill again with clean water but fortunately that wasn’t necessary. I could open the main tank drain, and after some work with one of our knives, it began to empty quickly. I’d let it drain all the way and after the rainwater started to collect again, I’d shut the drain. When we had water in the tank again, I’d flush the main drain for a few seconds and then flush the pipes to the house afterward.

  The tank was actually much larger than it needed to be. In the past, the rainfall would have been less than it was now, and the collector was designed to collect as much as possible. Now the tank would fill in a fraction of the time, if the rain was as heavy as it had been during the last storm, and the volume collected in a day would last us maybe a month if we weren’t extravagant. There was a simple overflow system that kept the tank from collapsing under the weight of too much water.

  The rain started before I was finished with the work, but it didn’t hinder me. There was a heavy downpour but no high winds. I stayed out until I had emptied the tank, closed the drain, collected a few inches of water, flushed the drain again, and finally closed it to let the tank fill completely.

  I went to the roof briefly and took a quick look at the solar collection tiles there. I didn’t actually climb all the way onto the roof, due to the rain and how slippery it might be but looking over the edge it seemed like the tiles were in good shape and fairly clean; there wasn’t a lot of dirt on these little islands. There was plenty of mildew, but the tiles were probably getting at least five percent of the energy that they would when I had cleaned them. I wasn’t going to try to reconnect the electrical system until the storm was over. For now, we’d live without lights or heat.

  It was funny that the new inhabitants of the islands hadn’t tried to make things work again. It would have been a simple matter of throwing the switches that had been shut off when the place was abandoned. I guess there weren’t any students with any kind of engineering background on the passenger list. Unless there was damage, it was really as simple as throwing a switch, but in the days leading up to the cataclysm, most people might not have been confident of their own ability to do e
ven that much for themselves.

  The house itself was in good shape, considering. It was built on stilts about four feet above the sand. It had to be. The ground that it was built on was only three to five feet above sea-level and a strong wind could blow waves all the way up to the foundation. A lot of houses like this, like near our estate in Kauai, would have a garage or other storage under the house but this one didn’t. There was no road and no car, no bicycles or barbecues, and not even enough surf to justify a surfboard. There was essentially nothing to store. The inevitable canoe would just sit on the sand. The only real possession would have been fishing poles and snorkel gear. Any trace of those was long gone.

  There was a big covered porch that faced the inner ring of the atoll. A front door led into a living room, maybe twenty feet square. A kitchen area was to the left, separated from the front room only by a raised island that served as a dining table. There were two simple bedrooms and a bathroom with a toilet and sink but no shower or tub.

  Any knives or utensils or small bits of personal items had been looted but the appliances and ceiling fans and such were still where they were supposed to be. Nobody had needed a microwave here. There wasn’t one but I don’t think that it would have been taken even if there had been. The larger villages had plenty of room, and apparently no one wanted to live here by themselves. Why was that? If it had been me, I would have wanted to live in as much isolation from the other people here as I could find.

  One thing that was definitely missing was any shred of fabric. No curtains, cushions, mattresses, carpets, or bath towels. I was starting to miss cloth. Not clothes but cloth. What would we sleep on? Leaves, maybe? Probably not. We could if we had clothes, and I did but the girls didn’t. Without clothes it would be pretty uncomfortable. We might end up sleeping on sand. Maybe I’d fashion some kind of a frame and make a sandbox. It would be softer, but the sand would get everywhere since we’d be sleeping naked. Oh, we could weave mats! That would do nicely. We’d get started on that as soon as we could.

  The rain kept coming. It was hard and steady. We closed the faucets for a while, and after an hour or so, we’d open them up and let the system flush until the water started to get low. We repeated that all afternoon. When it looked like the water was running clear, we turned the faucets off unless we needed water.

  The water was fresh. It tasted fine, and for the first time since I had arrived, I drank my fill. So did the girls. This amount of fresh water was rare, even in the villages, because it was hoarded by whatever tyrants happened to be in charge. There weren’t any cups or bowls, so we drank from our hands. Our dishes would have to be made from coconuts. Rangiroa had made part of its income from pearl harvesting, so there should be plenty of oyster shell that we could make use of as well.

  I was going to want to have dry wood for fires. I could stack wood underneath the house. We could use electricity for cooking if the stove still worked, except for the fact that there were no pots or pans. We’d have to make a shopping list. It might be that none of what we wanted would be available at all, but we could try trading for what was available. I’d want a fishing pole, a pan, a baking sheet, and an ax. I suppose I didn’t really need a fishing pole since Allie could catch what we needed. Probably the most useful thing would be an ax; we could cook by putting our meat on a stick if necessary.

  I asked the girls and they told me that it had been a long time since they had anything that had been cooked. Their diets had been grapes and fish for many years.

  While I had been on the roof, the girls had cleaned up what debris had made it into the house. There wasn’t much and it was mostly collected near the door and where a window or two had been left open. Now that the rain had started, there wasn’t much that I wanted to do. Later we could make brooms from some of the vegetation and do some sweeping and I’d take sand onto the roof and scrub the tiles, and we’d find some palm leaves to weave into mats; but not while it was raining so hard.

  Over the past few minutes, it had started raining really hard. The sound, now that we were under a roof, was loud. I sensed that all of us were a bit uneasy and finally suggested that we go down and sit under the house, rather than inside. I think that the girls were relieved. Being in a house was an exciting idea but because it was so foreign to them, the idea was more comfortable than the reality. We were happy outside, out of the rain, under the shelter of the floor above our heads. We could have sat on the porch but here on the sand felt more familiar to them; and the noise was less because we were separated from the roof, fifteen feet above. I was sure that we’d get used to the noise and not even notice it eventually.

  We sat and watched the rain. Then we lay on our backs and listened to the rain. For a while, we lay together with the girls on my shoulders and I think that we might have fallen asleep.

  Taking a nap together was a more remarkable event than it might first appear to be. We had all grown up in a hyper-vigilant state and the ability to relax enough to just fall asleep when we weren’t actually exhausted was a sign that we felt safer than had been normal for us. There was a lot that I wanted to know about the girls and what their experiences had been but now wasn’t the time to dredge up memories.

  A few times during the day we did get up and walk a bit and stretch our legs. We swam for a little while in the pouring rain, but we always returned to the shelter of the house. It was still raining when we fell asleep for the night, just as it was getting dark, late that afternoon.

  The routine was much the same for the next three days. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We sat under the house. We hardly talked because of the noise. We hugged each other as we slept but there was nothing especially sexual about our interactions.

  CHAPTER Twelve - Clearing

  When the rain finally stopped again, I estimated it to be the fifteenth day since I had washed up on the beach. Just about two weeks since Irene had pushed me over the side of the boat in an attempt to murder me. If I was right, today might be December 25th. Christmas day. Holidays didn’t hold any meaning now, except for the one that my family always observed no matter what: Cupcake’s Birthday.

  Cupcake’s Birthday was an annual week-long remembrance of the events that led to my grandfather’s ascension to head of the business empire that he ran but moreover, the week that brought Pops and my six grandmothers together as a family. Grandma Cupcake’s birthday coincided with some family milestone and it had been celebrated with gifts and special events ever since. The parties had been greatly subdued in the years after the cataclysm, actually since the prediction of the cataclysm but it was always observed as best we could. Cupcake’s Birthday was in September, and this year it had been more hopeful than normal.

  Pops had pushed again this year to give me my own Norg companion, like Alice, or my cousin Joshua’s Norg, Clarice but I declined again, the same way that I always had. I thought of Alice as one of my grandmothers. Clarice was nice but somehow I was just never into the idea. Now I had Allie and Christie. It would be hard work to get to where the three of us were really comfortable being together, based on our strange backgrounds; me as a focused post-cataclysm world-fixer, Allie as a castaway “Vegetable”, and Christie as a broken “Mushed”.

  I was glad now that I had resisted the idea of a Norg-Wife. In many ways my life up until now would have been easier, and I might be better at relationships and less lonely all these years, but she wouldn’t have been able to come on this trip and I would now be grieving the loss. I know that I would have truly loved her as much as Pops, and everyone else, loved Alice. Leaving her behind when I set out for the United States would have been impossible. The Norg couldn’t travel beyond our compound now because of the lack of satellite communications. I’m sure that if I had bonded with one, I wouldn’t have agreed to go on this trip, and I know that Pops and my dad would never force me to. If I hadn’t come, Irene and Clark wouldn’t have been able to go either.

  My question now was: would I really be able to bond closely with Allie and
Christie? I loved them but it was strange. Several days ago, I had loved them deeply. But it seemed that I might have the same kind of emotional and relational impermanence that Allie suffered from. She was better now than when we first met but she still seemed to have to work to remember me and our relationship every morning. Yes, I had a strong emotional bonding experience several days ago, and I had made love with each of them and was committed to staying with them, but it was hard for me to hold on to exactly why.

  I needed to change that. I needed to be deliberate about it and bring about the reality that I wanted. First, I needed to determine what I wanted. What I wanted was to establish a strong relational and sexual bond based on mutual love and commitment with these two girls. I wanted the kind of deep spiritual connection and oneness between us that Pops had with my grandmothers, and that my dad had with my moms. I wanted the exciting sexual energy that flowed from that kind of relationship; the kind that made us want lovemaking as often and as freely as any of us could ever desire.

  What I did not want was the soulless sham of a dead emotional slavery that my Uncle Clark had with my horrid bitch of an aunt, Irene. Yeah, maybe I wouldn’t have expressed it quite that way a few weeks ago but the witch had tried to murder me for Pete’s sake! And she had already pretty much killed my uncle emotionally long before that. And from stories that I’d heard fragments of, she’d done some pretty bad stuff to at least one of the Norg back at the resort in Oregon before she came to Tahiti. To my family, mistreating a Norg was at least as bad, if not worse than any other crime against humanity that you could commit. The Norg were wonderful, loving, beautiful creatures who never wished harm on anyone. I could almost forgive her for what she had done to me; I was in the way of her goals. But if she really did what Pops hinted at to one of the Norg at the residence where Joshua was, we should have tried and convicted her long ago.