Nine Island (14 page)

How about “anthropologist” vs. “gynecologist”?

A
ND THERE'S THE
story of the underground man who climbs from a hole in the earth and crouches low in the grass until he sees a girl, a girl in a field who's stalking a rabbit. He runs at her hard and pounces, holds her tight around the ribs, carries her off as she kicks and bites. Or let's forget the rabbit and have her gathering shells instead. Or maybe she's picking up trash on the beach, bottle caps and shreds of plastic bags and, gingerly with a stick, used condoms. Maybe she feels an affinity with trash, scraps of material everyone thinks are worthless, when really nothing is worthless, she knows this, everything was worth something once, everything should be cared for and saved. Anyway. He bursts out of his hole in the sand like an enormous malignant crab and clutches her and carries her off, and along the way something of hers gets ripped and falls, maybe an earring or bikini bottom, yes, it's her striped bikini bottom, and that piece of dirty cloth lies on the sand once he's dragged her underground, the only sign she'd ever been.

Y
ESTERDAY TWO
people sent messages about the duck, but not helpful.

Contact Animal Welfare!

Take it to Pelican Island!

Now that I am the duck's sole tender, saving her is up to me. I elevatored down to the leaking garage and got in the Mini, drove over the Venetian, dollar twenty-five toll and all, ramped onto I-95, and sped along in the white-hot light until 95 dumped me onto Route 1. Then way down Route 1, which ought to run beneath the Metrorail for shade but doesn't, to a sporting goods store. Went in and told the man there I needed a net. He was tall with damp-looking bristle on his face.

Fishing? he said.

No. A duck.

He didn't exactly smack his chops but looked eager and asked how much the duck weighed.

Eight pounds? No. More like a big chicken, maybe six.

He stared at me, eyebrows riding his forehead.

A six-pound duck? he said. Can't you just grab it?

She bites and is quick, I said. It's hard.

I won't transcribe the rest of the negotiations, but thirty-two dollars later I had a net fixed to a pole. Was excited to try it out—would need Buster's carrier nearby but not noticeable to the duck, and then stow her in the car.

But as I drove home, the blue sky exploded again, as it does every afternoon these days, so no attempts to capture duck.

When I got back to the Love Boat, three plumbers' vans blocked the way to the garage. And in the mail room, taped to the board behind glass:

Due to a flood in the 5 line of apartments, water will be shut off for that line tomorrow from 9:00 until 2:00. We apologize for any
inconvenience
.

Then, this morning, when I went down to swim:

Due to a flood in the 11 line of apartments, water will be shut off
for that line tomorrow from 9:00 until 2:00. We apologize for the
inconvenience.

Paced up and down the dock postswimming, with towel draped over head, glancing into the boats and water, but otherwise pondering condominium crime.

What's with all this flooding? I asked the Frenchman in the elevator going up.

He raised his eyebrows. Don't you know? He grinned and said, It's
sabotage
. Some people are not happy with decisions by the board.

The old board is flooding the new board's apartments? How do they even get in?

Ha ha! he said. No problem. Not in a building like this. Everyone is rotten. Everyone has a connection. It's all about
concrete
. And—

He made the money sign with his fingers as we walked down the vegetal hallway, then opened his door to a flood of barks.

My apartment door opens to a flood, too, of howls. When Buster's travels are blocked by a table or chair, he plops to a skinny hip and yowls. I don't think he hurts. I'm sure he doesn't hurt. I think he just can't hear himself—like the Human Body on the causeway, panting loud with earbuds in. I don't know. So I pick him up, which startles him, and hold him and rock with him on the black leather sofa, until he purrs and his claws sink into my skin.

At least the diapers have helped the other issue, because with this swirling cork floor it can be hard to identify liquids et cetera, and I was getting worn out by all the wiping and mopping. The diapers mostly hold, but he overflows sometimes, limping around with a heavy sog between his skinny black-and-white haunches, snail-line of wet behind him.

But it's still not time. I know it's not time. It can't be, because he purrs.

Flooding everywhere! Not just the men's spa and those lines of apartments and that watering woman upstairs, but the sky, the ground: so much traffic between sky and earth and sea down here. Lightning, fireworks, waterspouts, jets. It rains every day at four o'clock. If you're sitting on the balcony you can watch the rain come—it can be a pleasure watching the rain come, just sitting still and letting the world go. To the west, over the causeway and beyond the bay, where sandbars emerge at low tide and motorboats scallop the water, above all that, the sky is slowly overtaken by scuds of deep soft gray. First those thick gray banks roll over the horizon, then they draw so near they dissolve into skeins of water that hide the city bit by bit, a moving dissolution. You can watch the street-shine creep this way, slowly blurring buildings and parks, a zone of shine moving down Dade, over the bridge, and down the causeway, and exactly then you smell rain on hot pavement. As soon as you do there's a hitch in the air and you'd better run inside fast because all at once spray is whipping your windows and you can't even see Costa Brava. The rain slashes at a slant, streaming across the glass. Inside I sit and hold Buster, watching rain river down the windows, the hurricane doors rattling in their tracks.

• • •

Well, it is the season, said N.

I'd run into her and P waiting in the garage, all of us having hoped to escape, to go out for a walk after one long downpour looked about done, but no, another explosion. Water spewed up from the garage's drain holes, spewed up hip-high and thunderous. Outside, through the garage grate, water gushed from manholes and storm drains along the pink sidewalks, foaming, frothing, rivering over the curbs.

Hurricane season, I mean, said N, and when she did I could see the radar line clocking, searching for the telltale eye.

P gripped the garage's grate and half-hung, gazing out at the pour. The whole city will be underwater in thirty years, he said. Or sooner! To say nothing of this derelict place. He lifted his hands from the grate and laughed.

Funny man, that P: a glaze of jolliness bright over despair in his eyes.

Suddenly the roaring slackened, then stopped, and through the grate came blaze and steam. On the sidewalk lay bright pools of sky.

Thank god, said N. Let's go.

She pushed the button, the grate rose, and she and P passed into sunlight. But I waited and looked up at the giant belly of the pool, hanging down in the dimness, surrounded by cars.

Now that it was quiet, could hear a steady patter of dripping water. Water rich with chemicals and time slid down the pool's stalactites, making dark glinting puddles on the garage floor. And the belly of the pool itself: its rough concrete hide was like an ancient cave. You could almost see upon it the painted antelopes and aurochs, the dead man lying on his back, and beside him, the bird and the spear.

I
TOLD MY
mother that I knew being alone was not a real way to live. Like everyone, though, a liar.
Doch, doch
. It's the realest way. If you tend to a blind cat and stranded duck, and fragments of men drop into your in-box, and you talk now and then to a skeletal lady and wobbling old mother, and text occasionally with people your age, and focus on bringing a dead poet to life, surely that's enough.

Snow White had seven dwarfs, after all.

Must have added up to something.

I mean it. If a person drives herself around and has her own place and can fix most things or find and pay someone who can if she can't and is able to dig up inner resources to sustain herself even in bone-dry moments, absolutely baked and bone-dry moments, and if she has long since decided that for fuck's sake it's all right to drink alone—I mean, come on, there's no one to drink with—and if she's also decided that self-pleasuring is more than fine, it's healthsome, especially if accompanied by fantasies drawn from excursions into the world: that's fine.

I tried this out on N today and got her slow sad smile.

It's good for a person to have another person, she said. It's good to have a mate.

L
INO WAS IN
the elevator this evening when I was going out for my Venetian walk, wearing the usual FitFlops and the same shorts I wear every day and have probably worn for three decades. Lino looked me up and down. Beside him stood a brontosaurus in white sneakers, white shorts, white T-shirt, blue belt, with thick, brass-bright arms and legs.

You a personal trainer, too? said Lino.

Me? No. Just a civilian resident.

Lino peered at me from under his hat, this one white straw with a pink band. Okay, I might have seen you here before, he said. Maybe. He hooked a thumb at the man beside him. This is my personal trainer, he said. Say hello to the lady.

The trainer grinned a gold-toothed grin and said something that sounded like
Chiello
.

(Russian? Bodyguard?
Hit man
? They actually exist and will come to old Love Boats? A guy to bust in and flood apartments and spas?)

You're helping Lino get fit? I asked.

Ha! said Lino as the doors slid open. He'll do more than that!

Oh?

The bodyguard smiled at his sneakers.

A
NOTHER ETIOLOGY. Aristophanes' spheres in Plato's story (the spheres everyone seems to be writing about these days, even though
I
have loved them privately for decades and even wrote them into my marriage so-called vows): Aristophanes' spheres, the happy monsters that were each made of two people, man-woman or man-man or woman-woman, rolling around with four legs and four arms and two heads and hearts each, private parts squashed together. The only way to be whole was to be two. But these compounds were too strong, and a lightning bolt split them apart. Now they, we, spend our lives looking for our lost other halves.

No.

No other halves.

This is what I thought as I swam fierce laps, gasped at the lip of the pool, my legs swaying away each time I entered Fran's gyre, the unstoppable gyre of the senior club I am joining, and stared up at twenty-four stories of balconies, cloaked in the Love Boat's long shadow that each day leaves a little bit sooner.

Come closer, closer.

As Sir Gold once whispered to me.

W
AS WALKING toward the drawbridge along the green verge when a Jet Skier skimmed extremely loud and close, so close he almost ground into the rocks and I could see the sleekness of his skin. He was in black, his Jet Ski was black, and I stopped and looked at his forearms, his strong hands on the horns of his machine.

Then I just stepped gracefully off the bridge and skimmed down, down, slipped behind him, my legs clasping his wet legs, my breasts pressing his taurine back.

Let's go, let's go, let's go to the sea!

Standing up there with bony elbows on the dirty concrete, old feet in cracking FitFlops, as below me he whipped and spun in the water and froth, delighting like a dolphin.

Out of the blue I thought:
Look at me!

Now!

He rode on. He drew a huge spraying circle in the green, looped into another circle, digging, churning, cutting deep, dredging and ripping, spraying water and fuel-stink and engine screech, bucking and plowing, all horsepower, manpower.

Something cold stirred within me. I thought:
Harm should come
to you
.

Then forgot about him and walked on past the duck, first island, second, past the old pear-shaped man who goes around with a bag to feed the cats, the old man I am becoming, past the crazy boy who swoops on his banana bike, although he's way too big and fat for it; he always shouts Hello, I always shout Hello back; past the HAREM-car house, smoking inside with sinister sex, could see it in the fogged glass. Then, walking back, there was the sunset, splendid as always, and a person gets tired of appreciating the damned sunset, having to keep stopping and turning to look at it more, with tourists on the Duck Tour–mobile taking sunset selfies.

Enough with the sunset.

Like everyone, a liar. I
do
appreciate it! Beauty like that—makes you helpless. Makes me walk home stupidly backward, filling eyes with color.

At the Love Boat, walked as usual past the Dumpsters and through the gate over the soft grass by the mahogany tree. Skidded off FitFlops and lingered on the tender silky blades, then walked along the dock, peering into the water because, you know, that's living the life.

From the dock, something ahead of me suddenly slid into the bay. Not the first time this had happened: I once startled an iguana sunning on the dock and it slithered fast and plopped in; by the time I reached the spot, it had become a fish. There this thing was now, in the water plugging along with a beak and clawed wings batting. I crouched, crawled sideways as it platypussed along. Feathers? Fur? Webbed feet?

Meanwhile became faintly aware of a sound—the kind you hear without properly hearing, whatever the phrase for such ephemeral sensory experience is. Maybe boys shouting on Monument Island, maybe someone singing on a boat, nothing you'd lift your head for.

So didn't. Kept peering into the water trying to decipher the bird, lizard, or fish.