At the wharf two cables hanging from a crane swung heavily against a purple sky. All around him the small lights of houses burned behind their shutters.
He passed the night in a motel meant for tourists that smelled of cigarettes and bleach. Before dawn he was again outside her window.
After an hour or so she left the apartment and hurried up the street. He followed at a distance. A rum-and-cake vendor unbolted his kiosk and propped the awning. Three women on bicycles pedaled past. Naaliyah waved and they waved back. The sun broke the line of Grand Bonum above town and striped the street with light and shadow. He followed her another block and then called her name and she turned to face him as though both were players in some gun-fighters’ burlesque.
“David?”
“Don’t go out. Don’t go out today.”
Her shoulders heaved and she passed a hand over her temples. “Why are you doing this? You of all people are trying to stop me?”
A woman towing a child’s wagon full of melons passed and nodded at Naaliyah, and Naaliyah nodded back. Winkler approached. “I can’t let you out on the water.”
She stared at him. “But what does that mean? Why can’t I? What are you talking about?”
“Please.”
“If I don’t go I won’t be paid. You have to give me a reason.”
Winkler closed his eyes and inhaled. He was a yard away, within reach. “For me.”
“David.” She turned as if to go. He lunged and caught her T-shirt at the shoulder but she spun away and his hand slipped to her neck and she staggered for a moment. On the sidewalk a man in a white shirt with a short tie stopped and frowned. Naaliyah pushed forward with her legs and Winkler lost his balance and fell.
She stood a few feet away. “Christ!” she said, examining her collar, “What’s wrong with you?”
Winkler scrambled on the asphalt for his glasses. “You can’t—” he said.
“No. No way.” And she was walking away.
He gathered himself and followed her to the institute but she was nowhere. Her launch bobbed beside the jetty; the little trailer stood dark and empty. Was she watching him from somewhere? Had she taken another boat?
He clambered down the ladder, stood in her wobbling skiff, seized three black tubes leading to the outboard powerhead—a thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude—and pulled as hard as he could. Two of them gave; one squirted liquid onto his hand. Gasoline, mixed with oil. A multihued bloom of petroleum spread across the surface of the water. He climbed back up to the pier and wiped his hands on his trousers. A light flipped on inside the institute. He turned, nodded to a man who stepped out of the trailer, and went on toward town.
Nanton stalked the lobby, throwing his hands periodically toward the ceiling. “You think I cannot hire another gardener? In a minute? You think you are so skilled you cannot be replaced?” Winkler bore it, his gaze on the floor and the waving gray shapes of algae on the rubbled coral below. A tiny trumpet fish nosed along beneath the glass, turned its eye up at Winkler, then darted away.
At the yacht supply, he bought swimming fins and a large pair of chain cutters. Soma was at the shed door when he returned. He went inside and set his purchases on the table and began stuffing clothes into a two-ply garbage bag.
“What is this? You’re leaving?”
He grunted. He unclipped socks from his clothesline.
“I have not seen you behave like this in a long time. Not since the first year you arrived.” She pushed open his shutters and light poured in. “I don’t know everything that happened, David. I know you used to write letters. I know you left somebody at home, who you used to telephone. And I know that the box I brought upset you terribly.”
Insects shrieked in the mounds of cut grass beside the shed. A wind came up and stirred dust on the floor. “Naaliyah’s a woman,” Soma said. “An adult. She can make her own decisions.” She pulled one of Winkler’s shirts out of the bag and snapped it and folded it on the bed.
“Naaliyah will drown,” Winkler said.
Soma studied him. “What do you mean?”
“I know that she will drown. Soon.”
“You know it? I don’t understand. She swims like an eel.”
“I need you to tell her to stop going out in her launch. We need to keep her from the water.”
“You think she will listen to me?”
“Please, Soma.”
“You know she will drown?”
He looked at the floor between his feet for a long time. The sensation of an invisible hand crimped itself around his windpipe. “I dreamed it, Soma. I dreamed she would fall off the back of her boat and get tangled in the anchor.”
“You dreamed it.”
“Yes.”
Soma smoothed the edges of the shirt she had folded and put her hands on her hips. “You dreamed this about my daughter.”
“You don’t believe me. It’s all right.”
“I believe that you dreamed it. But how do you know the dream will come true?”
“I don’t. Not exactly.”
She went to the doorway and stood gazing out. “I just want everyone to be okay. Why do we let things that have already happened torture us?”
Winkler braced his hands on the sill of his window. He felt like rocking the wall back and forth until it collapsed and brought the shed down on top of them. “But this hasn’t happened yet.”
“Those, too. The things that have happened, and the things that could happen.”
A half hour later he was on the ferry to St. Vincent. He toted his sack of clothes through the streets and rented an unfurnished room above the butchery across from Naaliyah’s apartment. The odor of old meat rose through the linoleum. Ants patrolled the walls. In the bathroom a lustrous green moss had grown over the toilet tank. He bought a dented aluminum chair for $20 E.C. and plugged his hot plate into the extension cord the butcher had run up through the window.
The harder he tailed her, the harder she worked to conceal herself. It might have been comical if it had not been so awful: Naaliyah ducking behind fences, Winkler half jogging after her, a block away. Cat and mouse. But who was the mouse? Winkler chasing Naaliyah, the future chasing Winkler.
Her outboard had been repaired; she began collecting specimens in the early hours, in the evenings. He felt the arrival of his dream grinding like a bus toward him. I have become a stalker, he thought. An obsessed savant, slouching in the shadows outside her apartment, slumping past baskets of oranges at the market.
In the aluminum chair, facing her window, he tried writing the recommendation letter. Dear Admissions Committee, he’d try. Naaliyah Orellana is remarkable.
Dear Admissions Committee, You will not believe how extraordinary Naaliyah Orellana is.
Dear Admissions Committee. Naaliyah Orellana is. Naaliyah Orellana is. Naaliyah Orellana is.
Naaliyah sat across from an overweight white man, perhaps the same age as Winkler. They sipped ice water on a restaurant balcony, waiting for their dinners beneath a faded umbrella emblazoned with red and green roosters. Behind them huge purple batiks shifted uneasily in a breeze. The overweight man gestured at Naallyah with his fork; she smiled.
“I only need one minute,” Winkler told the hostess. He had to interlock his fingers so his hands would not shake. “They are friends of mine.”
When Naaliyah saw him, her face paled. “David,” she said. “Hello. This is Dr. Meyer. He is my advisor at the institute.” The big man shifted his napkin, half stood, and held out a hand.
“Mr., ah—”
“Dr. Winkler,” Naaliyah said.
“Ah,” Meyer said. “The mysterious other recommender.”
Winkler did not take the man’s hand. “Naaliyah,” he said. He crouched so his eyes were level with hers. “We have to talk.”
“Is this the best time for that?”
Meyer sipped his ice water. Naaliyah held her hands very carefully in her lap. “Are you all right, David?”
“I had a dream,�
� Winkler whispered. Meyer was looking over Naaliyah’s head. “I don’t think you should go out in the boat.”
A group of children, passing below in the street, began to sing “Happy Birthday.” Naaliyah managed a small, forced smile. “You’ve said this before, David.”
The hostess was standing behind Winkler. “Everything okay?”
“Yes,” said Naaliyah.
“No,” said Winkler.
The hostess leaned over. “Come now, mister. Let’s leave them to eat, yes?”
“Please,” Winkler said. He was being led out. “Please, Naaliyah.”
“A pleasure, Dr. Winkler,” Meyer called after him.
He tailed her home; he tailed her to work the next day. From the shadows of the institute, swallowing hard, he watched her start her Evinrude.
But still she did not drown. Still she came back, motoring beside the jetty, apparently whole, apparently breathing. He watched her unload her net bags and empty them into aquariums. He felt like sneaking up behind her and poking her in the side, to see if she was real.
Monday—seven days after he had his dream—there was a knock on the door of the apartment. Soma stood on the iron staircase squinting in. She wore gold bangles through her ears and her crucifix over her sternum and a discolored lace-hemmed dress that stopped at her knees. “The butcher told me you were here,” she said, and stepped through the door and surveyed the gritty tiles, the chair by the window. Over her shoulder hung a bag of books. Winkler returned to his chair and sat down.
“She’s inside,” he said. “I’m nearly positive. If she slipped out this morning, I didn’t see it.”
“When was the last time you slept?”
“Last night. I think. Did you talk to her?”
She went around in front of him and squatted on her heels. “David, can you look at me? Can you listen? You’re afraid for her, that is all. And rightly so. It is dangerous for anyone to be alone on the water. But you can’t watch over her every moment. You must learn to let go. Believe me, it’s not easy. But you must let whatever will happen, happen.”
“No,” Winkler said, shaking his head, looking past her. “You don’t get it.” Pale rectangles of light fell through the panes and divided their bodies into parallelograms.
Soma put her hands on his shoulders. “You had a daughter, no?”
He felt a voltage rising behind his eyes. “Grace.”
“What was she like?”
He looked away. He shut his eyes. Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition. No longer could he recall her face precisely, or her fingers, or the smooth, new skin on the bottoms of her feet. What was the shape of her cheekbones? Of her mouth? All he could remember was Sandy’s copy of Good Housekeeping, Joyce Brothers and Tupperware, how to trim sugar from your family’s diet, a promise to reveal Valerie Harper’s real-life loves.
“She had my eyes,” he said. Electricity sizzled behind his forehead.
Still squatting, Soma brought her body toward his, a disjointed embrace. “Okay, David. It is okay. I will talk to Naaliyah. It will be okay.”
A snowflake, a honeycomb, a spider’s web stretched across the doorframe. He found a dead katydid in the corner of the apartment and turned it in his hands, the small, polished thorax, ten thousand tiny hexagons in its diaphanous wings. Sixes and sixes and sixes. Were there solutions here, clues to what he was missing?
Roiling skies, burning skies, skies bleached silver with heat. Emaciated dogs dozing in doorways. The levels in the town reservoirs shrank as though drains had been unplugged beneath them. Irrigation canals ran at half their normal levels, then less. Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the hear. In the evenings a hot wind would start up from the west and heave red dust over the island: dust on the sills and louvers, dust in his rice, dust in his throat. The entire island seemed dimmer somehow, as if its hills were crumpling back into themselves.
Insomnia, a pending calamity: Hadn’t he been through all this before? He thought of graduate school, growing ice on a supercooled copper pipe. Each dendritic arm of a snow crystal always corresponded precisely to the others, as if, as they formed, each knew what the other five arms were up to. Was this so different from the shape of his own life, the way his personal history seemed to repeat itself: George DelPrete, Sandy, Grace, now Naaliyah? Who next? Himself? He was trapped in the lattice of an ice crystal, more molecules precipitating around him every second; soon he would be at the center, locked in a hexagonal prison; one of them, a quarter billion of them.
Soma came through the door, her dress soaked with sweat, the skin beneath her eyes swollen. She sat on his aluminum chair and blew her nose into a yellow handkerchief. “She wouldn’t even open the door. She said I was trying to keep her from the only thing she loved.”
Her cheeks drew inward; her fingers trembled. She opened a book on her lap and turned pages without reading. A few moments passed, just the two of them in the apartment, a truck passing in the street. Then he took her head in his arms, smelling the back of her neck, a smell like salt, and hens, and soap. The book fell from her lap and neither moved to pick it up. They sat like that, her head in his arms, watching the window go dark.
From then on. Soma joined him every evening after her shift and together they stared across the sandy, unpaved road at the sheets in Naaliyah’s windows. They managed to keep watch in a kind of unspoken rotation. Soma blinking in the chair, Winkler retreating to lie on the folded blanket in the corner every dozen or so hours to close his eyes and feel the heat and hear the bananaquits sing from the rooftops behind them.
“You have been fired,” Soma told him. “Nanton put your things in a cardboard box. He says he’ll burn them.”
“Let him,” Winkler said.
“He’s just talking. I think he misses you.”
“I bet Felix misses you.”
“Let him. He has his rum.”
In the afternoons, with Soma at work and dark stratocumulus banking up overhead, the light in the trees would go so flat he could see no more than a few feet into them, and an immense stillness would accumulate, and he’d get a gagging feeling, as if the oxygen had been choked out of the air. In those moments everything felt as if it were waiting: himself, Soma, Naaliyah’s concrete building across the way, the vendors fanning themselves in their stalls, the masts wobbling out in the harbor. A hot, sickly smell would rise from the tiles, and the cathedral bell would clang, and he’d get a slow, certain sense of the impermanence of his life, the vastness of the universe and his own insignificance in it. Eventually he would run out of hours; eventually Naaliyah would slip away and die.
He crept through town to the pier to sabotage her launch a second time. He snipped a foam-covered hose running out from the Evinrude and yanked out what he thought might be plugs. He cut the anchor chain and heaved the cinder block overboard—the water closed over it with a clap.
Thunderclouds dragged black tendrils of evaporating rain through the sky. Lightning rang back and forth over the horizon and pelicans labored up from warehouse roofs on their huge, prehistoric wings and skimmed the telephone wires.
6
To the Selection Committee—
Here are some of the things Naaliyah Orellana showed me, one afternoon, when she was ten. A hermit crab trying out new shells; a large underwater shape (sea turtle? ray? monk seal?) swimming lazy circles between two groupings of coral; boobies raiding each other’s eggs; tropic birds (red- and white-footed, with a long white feather trailing behind them); a shining winged beetle like a drop of mercury on a fence post; a militia of tiny ants invading a bag of cereal; black crabs dashing sideways into burrows; a white urchin the size of her thumbnail; two long-necked anemones in a tide pool engaged in slow-motion wrestling; an emaciated feral cat trotting up the path behind us, then carefully stepping back into the vegetation; clown fish, triggerfish, iridescent an
d turquoise fish; yellow and white angelfish; brackish pools squirming with tadpoles; goats and ewes and one white horse snapping at flies in the corner of his paddock; a tortoise upside down in the road that hissed and groaned at us as we righted him; a beautiful crest-headed bird like an oversized blue cardinal; a half dozen cattle egrets high-stepping behind a lawnmower; a tiny chick in a hole on the ground, its back to us, looking around in the dark; a snail the size of a tennis ball making its way toward the kitchen trash, its eyes waving on stalks. “Look in one spot for a minute,” Naaliyah told me. It was a game she’d play. “Choose grass or sky or beach or water—and something will cross it.” And these are just the things I can remember.
To live in the tropics is to always be reminded (I find a hornets in my rice, a minnow in my shaving water) of the impossibility of ownership. The street in front of me belongs more to whatever is tunneling up those hundred or so little mounds of red dirt than to any of us. The beams of this apartment belong to houseflies; the window corners to spiders; the ceiling to house geckos and roaches. We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours—the time we’re given on earth—does that belong to us?
“An amazing book,” Naaliyah once told me, “could be written about mites.” To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry. The least things enrapture her: she used to lie on her stomach and watch a tiny square of reef through a plate of glass for hours. Her shortest excursion into the world is a field trip. For me it is a reminder of the poverty of my own vision.
Naaliyah possesses all the things that keep us from giving up: exuberance, curiosity, hope. She is a gift to the world—I pray you will find it in you to grant her the opportunity for more study.
About Grace Page 16
