Island Read online

  Using her arms to drag herself forward, Lillith managed to reach the staircase, and then to mount it. From the top stair she could see the cruel, black wind which had carried away the trees and shacks, and most of Hatra’s house. It was storming now over the ocean and scattering mindlessly all those things it had stripped from the land. And then, as Lillith looked out toward the horizon, she saw there forming a wave so high that even she, a creature of the sea, was seized with fright. On it came, ever increasing in its size and speed, roaring louder than had the great wind. Below her on the island Lillith saw the villagers crying for mercy with desperate voices. And as the foot of the wave rushed onto the island, many of the villagers were immediately sucked into it. Then the body of the wave curled over the island, and at its center Lillith saw floundering the fisherman’s wife along with many others whose legs were turning like wheels that would hasten them away had they only the chance. At the moment when the fisherman’s wife knew that it was over and that all her struggling would do her no good, she held up her arm and extended one finger as if to mark for some all-seeing power the very spot where she would go down. And then Lillith saw, as the wave broke over her, quieting the screams of the last of the islanders with its unspeakable force, her fourteen sisters swimming towards her, joining hands and forming a circle in which she, Lillith, would soon be the center and there sprout a fin on her mutilated tail and thus swim evermore in the watery world where love means merely going side by side with one’s companions, equally spaced like one large body, and evil is a word which one need not know.

  That ought to give them all something to think about.

  Belinda

  Oh, I could tell them a story all right, one that’d knock their socks off. There was a woman who spent half her life believing that someone far away loved her. And this woman also believed that, like herself, her faraway lover was waiting for the time when they could come together, even if they had to wait until they were very old. Yeah, yeah, yeah—what a story that’d be. And the foolish woman would let herself dream about the circumstances under which this inevitable coming together might happen. Oh yeah. She had them coming together in her daydreams and in her night dreams—a phone call, a letter, a knock on the door, a chance meeting on her annual plane ride to see her mother, a pulling up to a red light on the highway … And so she spent half her life living with one man and dreaming about another, and when things got bad with the man she lived with, well then at least she had her dreams.

  That’s a sad story, Roscoe will say. And Donald will nod and look at me with puppy-dog eyes. And the two idiots will never even realize … And then one day the foolish woman confronts the man she loves and what does she find out but that somehow she was mistaken! He never loved her after all! Now that’s a blow. But get this: At the very same moment, she realizes that she doesn’t love him either, not in the least, that she never did, that she’s just a strange old bird who needed a fantasy to get her through the long black night she calls her life. Poof! Gone! Like a bubble bursting over her head.

  So who’s the loser here, folks? Is the woman the loser because she was foolish enough to add two and two and get five? How could she make such a mistake, such an assumption? I mean, any stupid idiot could figure it out. A man who loves a woman doesn’t go get married to a different woman just when he finds himself free to go to the … But no … This woman is so stupid she can figure out all sorts of reasons why he might have married the other woman. After all, she says to herself, he did that once before. Or is the woman the winner, because she got years and years of dream material out of one stupid illusion? Pretty resourceful, I’d say. Then the man must be the loser, because here he’d had someone loving him and dreaming about him and he wasn’t going to have that anymore. Who knows how another person’s love coming at you from a distance affects you? Who knows if all those good vibes don’t protect you from misfortunes somehow? And then, poof! To have it all cut off in one fell swoop, cut off just like the woman’s fantasy life. If something terrible where to happen to him now, who could say it wouldn’t be the result of that unseen love being cut off so suddenly?

  Why, you could feed a room full of philosophers for a week with such questions!

  Who’s the winner, Donald? He’ll think about that for a while, and then he’ll clear his throat and come up with some answer that sounds great but doesn’t mean a damn thing. And someone else will contradict, maybe Carole. She’ll say, Oh no, Donald. I think … And then Roscoe will have his say. And the kid, too, because I bet she knows something about fantasies. And I’ll sit back and listen to them jabbering away. And I’ll be thinking, There are no winners, you fools!

  Roscoe

  Once there was a woman, an older woman—in her sixties, say—and this woman had a husband and a duck. She loved her husband dearly, but her husband was often indifferent to her, and so she was glad to have her duck.

  The woman and her husband lived in a house in a rural community. With the exception of the house next door, they were surrounded by woods. Their house had a small back yard and in it a little green pond. The woman’s duck swam in the pond and the woman spent many hours watching him swim. When she watched him, she would smile. ’Round and ’round he went.

  Not all ducks are affectionate, but this one was. When the woman called him, he would come out of the pond and stand near her ankles and eat cracked corn from her hand. The woman would admire him and pat his wet feathers. Then the duck would waddle back to the pond and swim some more. There was no fence separating the woman’s back yard from the woods, but she believed that she and the duck had some kind of understanding and that he would never wander away.

  The woman’s husband hated the duck, because its excreta littered the yard. And it smelled! He spoke to his wife about it. She said she would clean it up, but when she went out to do so she saw it was not an easy task, for a duck’s feces are not as solid as the feces of most other animals. Actually they’re very watery. She would take a shovel and try to keep her promise to her husband, but it was impossible to pick any up without picking up a clump of earth at the same time. She would wind up stepping on more than she shoveled. And there was so much! It seemed no matter how much she shoveled, there was always the same amount remaining. Trying to get it all exhausted her, and eventually she would give up and sit down in her lawn chair and simply watch her duck. And besides, she would think, where was she to put its feces anyway? She certainly couldn’t throw them in the duck’s little pond, and the small brook that fed the pond ran downstream through her neighbor’s back yard. She had seen the neighbor’s grandchildren lying across the rocks and drinking the brook water with their hands. She was too unsteady to cross the brook to the woods, so she couldn’t throw them there. She had tried to dig a hole in the yard, but she wasn’t strong and the hole she dug wasn’t very deep. It filled up quickly. How many holes could she make before it became dangerous to walk outside in the dark?

  One day the woman’s next door neighbor came over to complain about the duck. She stood on the steps and refused to come inside, saying the duck’s quacking kept her awake.

  The woman didn’t understand. It seemed to her that lots of people she knew had dogs that barked and cats that sprayed, and no one ever complained about them. So why should anyone mind her duck’s quacking? “The duck is my companion,” she said. “When he quacks, he’s really talking to me. Or sometimes he talks to himself. Quack, quack, quack. He’s a duck. He quacks. Please be tolerant. He’s really not that loud. If he bothers you, you can keep the windows closed on one side of the house.”

  Just then the woman’s husband came home. He saw the look on his neighbor’s face and said, “What’s the problem?”

  His wife said, “Our neighbor doesn’t like my duck’s quacking.”

  Her husband said, “Oh, is that all!” And he laughed as he went past the neighbor and into the house.

  That night at dinner the woman spoke harshly about the neighbor. “It’s easy for her to complain about
my duck,” she said. “She has children. Her husband is dead, it’s true, but her daughter comes to visit her all the time. I’ve seen her pull up in her station wagon with her little ones in the back. I’ve seen them going into the house, all excited to see their grandmother. And her son is a rich lawyer. He sends her money. Zelda at the post office told me so! Do you see the curtains on her windows? Fancy stuff, isn’t it? That’s because her son sends her money. And that car that she drives? Her son paid for that. Zelda knows all about it. If I had a daughter to come calling with her children, and a rich son who loved me enough to send me money … but I’ve got nothing. I’ve got a duck, that’s all.” She threw her hands up in the air and looked at her husband.

  “I retire soon,” he said. “I’d like to take the savings and sell the house and travel for a while.”

  His wife thought about that. Then she said, “You travel if you want to. I’ll be here when you get back. I’ve got to take care of my duck.”

  “You would let that duck keep you here?” he asked.

  “Yes I would,” she said indignantly.

  “What if the duck dies before I leave? Then would you come with me?”

  “You lay a hand on that duck—”

  No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, if the duck dies of natural causes. Then would you?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to see.”

  But the duck didn’t die. In fact, the duck made a friend. One day when the woman was in her lawn chair watching her duck swim ’round and ’round, another duck, a female, appeared at the edge of the yard. Her duck quacked an invitation, but the female hesitated and kept her eye on the woman. So the woman got up slowly and went into the house. And sure enough, in a little while she saw from the kitchen window that her duck and the female had made friends.

  That night at dinner she said to her husband, “Look out the window. They’re swimming side by side. I’m so happy for them.”

  “I don’t want to look,” he said.

  “But it’s a lovely sight. Two lonely ducks coming together. I hope she never leaves him. He’d be so sad now that he knows what it’s like to have somebody to love him.”

  Then the man got up from his chair and went to the window. It was already growing dark, but he could see the two ducks swimming side by side. “I’ll be leaving soon,” he said.

  “To go where?” his wife asked as she went to stand beside him.

  “Maybe Arizona for a while. I want to see the Grand Canyon. I want to see how I like the weather out there. Will you be coming with me? Yes or no?”

  The woman looked out the window and smiled. “How can I leave?” she asked.

  One day the female duck made a nest in the rotten spot in a fallen tree near the pond. The woman saw her and knew she would soon be laying her eggs. She was very happy. But she didn’t dare to tell her husband for fear that he would say something about the condition of the yard and she would have to go out with the shovel again to appease him. Since the female duck had come, he had said very little and she didn’t want to start him up. In fact, the woman believed he was beginning to like the ducks just a little, for on more than one occasion she had caught him watching them from the kitchen window. He had even volunteered to go next door and tell the neighbor about the new duck, his thinking being that it was better to tell her straight off than to have her discover it by herself. Also he thought the neighbor should know that his wife had not encouraged the female duck. She had come on her own, as is natural.

  The time came for the man to leave for his trip. He was going to Arizona.

  “When will you be back?” his wife asked as she packed his handkerchiefs in the smaller of his two bags.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve had an all right life together, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, it’s been all right,” she said, but she thought to herself, What a peculiar thing for him to say!

  A few days later the woman counted four eggs in the female’s nest. She was very excited. She wondered how many more were still to be laid and how long it would take until they hatched. She wondered too if the female duck would talk the male into leaving for the wilds after the eggs hatched. They talked about something—quack, quack, quack—all day. To the woman’s ears their discussions sounded very serious, as though a major life decision were being made. She tried to prepare herself for the possibility of their leaving, but she soon found out there is no way to prepare for such a thing. Her heart would not let her imagine such a thing. All she could do was hope.

  She remembered how her husband had gone over to the neighbor’s to explain about the female duck. Her husband had returned very satisfied with the results of his explanation. The woman thought about this, and one day, when one of the eggs had a hairline crack in it, she went to the neighbor’s door and rang the bell.

  The neighbor answered the door in a pretty green suit and high heels. Her hair was done, and she was wearing make-up. She looked very nice, much younger than her years. Beyond her, the woman could see sheets—sheets on all the fancy furniture her son’s checks had paid for. “I’m packing up the house,” the neighbor said when she saw the woman looking.

  “Why?” the woman asked, surprised.

  “I’m going away for a while.”

  “But your daughter and your grandchildren,” the woman said.

  The neighbor laughed. “I won’t be gone forever.”

  “I came to borrow some sugar,” the woman said, recalling the real reason for her visit and seeing that there was no sense in mentioning it now.

  “I don’t have any sugar,” the neighbor said.

  That evening the woman took a blanket and went outside to sit in her lawn chair and watch her ducks. She stayed out far later than usual, despite the cool weather.

  A year passed before she heard from her husband. He sent a letter on light blue writing paper with a little butterfly in one corner—not the kind of writing paper she would have expected him to use. The letter said that he and the neighbor were companions in Arizona. It said he was sorry things had worked out as they had. He wouldn’t ask her for a divorce because he knew that would be too painful. He hoped there would be no hard feelings. He and the neighbor were planning to return and live in the neighbor’s house. They’d talked about it and had decided they should all be close together, for they were all getting old and it was good to have people around that you could depend on. But it would be a while yet before they could return because they’d bought furniture for their apartment and now they had to sell it. A buck was a buck and they would need the money for the trip home. They wanted to take their time coming home and make some stops along the way—a little vacation.

  The woman folded the letter and put it in a drawer. Then she went outside to watch the ducks.

  One day the woman saw her husband’s car pull up in front of the house. The neighbor got out wearing the same green suit and high heels she had left in. The woman went outside to greet them. Her husband gave her a hug. The neighbor took her hand. But as they were standing there, all three smiling and wet-eyed, the husband cocked his head. “Not more ducks,” he said to his wife. The neighbor sighed and dropped the woman’s hand. The husband and the neighbor had forgotten all about the ducks until now. The woman shrugged. She didn’t know what to say. Her husband started walking around the house toward the back yard. The neighbor and the woman fell in line behind him.

  In the back yard they stood and looked and said nothing. There were ducks in the pond and ducks lying in groups around the pond. There were ducks all over the grass and ducks on the steps that led to the back door. There were ducks everywhere—sleeping, swimming, quacking, eating, and defecating. The neighbor put her hands over her ears. The man grabbed his nose and held it closed against the foul smell. The woman made her way to her lawn chair. Sighing, she picked up the duck that had been sleeping on it and sat down with him on her lap.

  Donald

  Let us be honest. Let us go then, you and I,… Let us go hence: the nig
ht is now at hand,… Let us begin and carry this corpse, Singing together. But let us be honest: Donald Bartlett suffers from a personality disorder. I suspected it for some time, but I only became convinced today when I saw him offer to the woman he loves an inexcusably sophomoric sonnet which he wrote God knows when for God knows whom. Nor was this the first time he had forsaken his muse, justifying his faithlessness merely on my report that she had long since forsaken him.

  The time has come … Now is the time for all good men … to gather together and give a name to Donald Bartlett’s disorder. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them, and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. What, one might ask, are his symptoms—other than a persistent need to contemplate his conflict with his muse? He suffers from severe depression and delusions of unworthiness, autism, cerebrotonia, intropunitive aggression, sensory deprivation, constipation, and, at present, inebriation. Perhaps we could ask Roscoe for the one word to describe the defendant, for he knew the defendant when he was not the defendant and could offer us an apt comparison of the defendant’s behavior now and then. But alas, even as I ready the deposition, Roscoe, oblivious to our dilemma, tosses candles into the air, and if he thinks of anything at all, beyond how much greater would be the effect of his performance had he great lighted torches instead of wee unlighted sticks of wax, it is of the story he will tell when the time comes to tell the story, for all men are story-tellers and have been since the beginning of time. Let us leave the task to Adam.