The islanders didn’t try to stop me. Quite the contrary. They ran onto the beach beside me, a hundred to my left, a hundred to my right. They were dressed in their full “welcome” regalia—foot-long penis gourds and straw skirts. A half dozen of the young men wore Philip’s red-striped boxer shorts and my lace brassieres: they wore them as headdresses. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the dune’s crest, they formed their great tapestry again, of which I was now evidently a panel. I was woven into the living cloth between the old woman and a warrior.
Everyone who could find a palm frond picked one up and shook it at the sailors in mimicry of me.
I threw down my frond and raised my arms to alert the sailors that I was the white woman for whom they were looking, and the islanders threw down their fronds and pointed to themselves. When I jumped up and down, shouting for the sailors to hurry up and rescue me, the islanders jumped up and down and shouted for the sailors to hurry up and rescue them. When I finally broke ranks and plunged into the surf, screaming for the sailors to save me, the islanders ran into the waves, screaming for the sailors to save them.
From a hundred yards out, I doubt the sailors could distinguish one of us from another. My face, after all, was tattooed. I was practically naked. My hair, though red, was every bit as kinky as a Ta’un’uuan’s.
All the sailors must have seen were screaming, gesticulating natives, of which I was merely the loudest and most hysterical.
They did not venture closer. They stopped and idled the skiff just outside the fringing reef. One scanned the shore with a pair of binoculars while the other wielded an oar, like a club, threatening the warriors not to swim toward them.
I was kneeling in the draining tide—sand-crusted, waterlogged, hoarse from shouting. I still thought I was distinguishable from the islanders, that all I needed to do to be rescued was to get the sailors to really look at me.
I rose up, streaming sea grass and salt water, and screamed till my throat went raw, and the Ta’un’uuans stood up and screamed, too.
The sailors shot off a flare. It corkscrewed across the low sky.
I suddenly remembered that Philip and I had been given a box of flares to signal back when the time came. I ran to the dune where I thought our camp had been and started clawing through the sand for flares. Without breaking ranks, the islanders ran with me, dropped to their knees, and searched, too.
To those on deck about to have their second afternoon cocktail, we probably looked like a flock of sandpipers hunting for crabs.
The sailors gunned the skiff, then slowly paralleled the shore, careful not to veer any closer. They both scoured the jungle with binoculars, stopping now and again to shoot off a flare.
The Ta’un’uuans and I watched as the flaming white tracers looped overhead.
When the sailors had practically circumnavigated the island, when they’d used up all their flares and still gotten no response, not even so much as a plume of signal smoke or a flash of mirror, they headed back to the ship and were hoisted aboard.
The ship blasted its horn and fired off a dozen more flares.
I stood atop my dune, waving my arms like a semaphore.
The islanders didn’t try to mimic me any longer. They assembled on either side of me and watched intently as the ship let loose one last rocket before beginning its turn to the north. Only when it became clear to them that their audience was sailing away did they abandon their posts, and the great tapestry tore apart around me.
I sank down on the sand unable to take my eyes off the ship until it dissipated once again into vapor.
I found Philip just before dusk. It wasn’t especially difficult. In my struggle to keep up with the old woman the night before, I had practically razed a one-lane highway across the island.
He was sitting where I’d left him under the vaulted hull. As soon as I stepped on the plank floor, he turned his head in my direction. I couldn’t tell if he actually saw me or if he was merely following my footfalls.
I sat down across from him and placed my hand over his. His thumb was torn and bleeding from picking at a splintery board while he’d waited. His left eye, the least swollen of the two, opened, just a notch.
“Where are the sailors?” he asked.
“You can see me, can’t you?”
“Where are the ship and the sailors?”
“They wouldn’t come ashore.”
“What do you mean, they wouldn’t come ashore?”
“When they didn’t see us or our camp, they wouldn’t come ashore.”
“That makes no sense. How could they not see you, Sara?” I tried to gauge, from the sliver of blue awareness behind the black bar, just how much he could see.
“Where are the sailors now?” he asked.
“They left.”
“
They
left, or the
ship
left?”
“The ship.”
“That’s not possible. We’re first-class passengers, for God’s sake. Richter paid for our tickets. He’s too important a man for them to just leave us here.”
“They left us,” I said.
“Of course they left us. They
left
to get help.” He shook his head stiffly, but his voice reached a register he only hit when frightened. And, of course, I could no longer read his expression. It was like trying to decipher meaning in, say, a pattern of sunlight or the design on an insect wing.
“Someone has to come for us,” he said.
He angled his head back the way a middle-aged man does when trying to focus on the fine print. His left eyelid drew almost completely open, then quickly shut.
“Did you see me?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Or you don’t want to know?”
The lid slowly ascended. He looked straight at me.
“You see me, Philip. What do you think the sailors saw?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Permanence is what gives the tattoo its power. A tattoo can’t be torn up in a fit of artistic frustration, or undersold at auction, or tossed into a bonfire to make a point. It can’t be dismissed by saying, “I’ll do it better next time.” Once written on the skin, a tattoo can never be undone, except, of course, by death.
Philip closed his one good eye and didn’t open it again for the rest of the afternoon—whether to nurse it or to not look at me, I wasn’t sure. He sat on the stone steps making frenzied, hopeless plans for our rescue, as if he could succeed where I had failed. First light, we’d walk back to the beach and
he’d
find the missing flares. Next, he’d build two tower-high signal fires on each end of the cove and one up on the cliff. After that, we’d circumnavigate the whole island and build a hundred more. “That’s what you should have done, Sara, built a signal fire the second you reached the beach.”
“With what?” I finally asked. “You have any matches? Because I sure as hell didn’t.”
He fell silent, then slowly turned around until he faced me. He opened his eye once again. “Do I look like a monster?” he asked.
I shook my head no, but so tentatively, it felt more like an admission than a denial.
“I need to know, Sara.”
“There are just a few thin lines.”
“Don’t lie.”
“Six. Stripes. Running down your face.”
“Over my eyelids?”
“Yes.”
“What color are they?”
“Black.”
“Where do they begin?”
“At your hairline.”
“End?”
“Your jaw.”
“Are they thick?”
“Yes.”
“You said six?”
“Six.”
He gingerly touched his face as if he was trying to count them.
“What do I look like?” I finally asked.
He let his hands fall away. “They’ll come off, Sara. Surely if they can build a skyscraper, they can remove our tattoos.”
“What do I look like?” I asked again.
His good eye suddenly filled with tears. He tried to blink them back, but they spilled over onto his striped face. “Not so bad, really. You look like you’re wearing a veil over your mouth.”
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“Your lips are black. There are half circles on your chin and—”
“Stop looking at me!” I said.
I tried to cover my face, but he took hold of my wrists, then gently drew me against him until I stopped sobbing. By the time I quieted down, all that remained of the day were flashes of heat lightning in the twilight and a streak of molten sea where the sun had set.
We sat down side by side and waited for darkness to arrive as one would wait for a sedative to take effect.
Sometime during the night, I heard Philip stirring. I’d been too frightened to fall asleep myself. I groped for his hand, but I couldn’t find it in the dark. There was no moon. The only hint of luminosity was the disks of stars visible through the hull’s portholes.
“Sara, can you take me to the beach?”
“I can’t even find your hand.”
“We have to get back there as soon as we can and start a signal fire. We can use flint or bang together two sharp stones. A spark is all we need. If that doesn’t work, we can always steal fire from the villagers. Captain Hirata wouldn’t have just left us here. By now, he’s radioed someone, somewhere, for help. We need to be on the beach first light so they can find us. Maybe he just moved the ship away from the reef for the night, anchored it up the coast, and you just didn’t see him go there.”
“I don’t think he’s anchored up the coast,” I said.
“In any case, he’ll never find us if we stay here.” For a moment, his disembodied voice sounded so young and confident, so like my old Philip, that I almost gave in to it. Then I envisioned the black bars, and the bewildered wet blue eye looking out.
“I’m not sure I want to be found,” I said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Are you so sure?”
He didn’t answer me.
“How can we go home, Philip? Do you think we’ll just resume our old life?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dinner with Richter at 21? Drinks in the Village afterward? How will we get there? Subway? Bus? Hail a cab?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who will stop for us?”
“I want to go home,” he said.
First light, I guided Philip back to the beach. He still shuffled like a blind man, his good eye watering shut whenever the sun struck it. In the forest’s shadows, however, I noticed that same eye managed surreptitiously to take in my profile.
I knew what he was looking for because whenever he rested his eye, I searched his face for it, too—the childhood scar, a flash of pink lip, anything familiar, anything to assure me that he was still inside.
About a hundred yards from where our camp had been, a fisherman stood knee-deep in the shallows, hauling in a net of undulating silver. He stopped to watch as Philip and I began dragging branches and logs out of the jungle and onto the dunes. He didn’t seem at all alarmed that we were trying to build a signal fire. Matter of fact, when Philip and I couldn’t incite so much as a hint of a spark by banging together two stones, he took pity on us, waded ashore and offered us a single match from a red and gold box he carried in his headband.
Staring down at the tiny matchbox stranded on his tattooed palm, I was so taken aback by the lettering—WASHINGTON SQUARE HOTEL:
CONVENIENT TO EVERYTHING!
—that I almost forgot how it got there.
I would have given years to have kept that box.
Philip and I squandered the match in a draft of wind. The fisherman had to light our signal fire for us. As soon as he left, we stoked it until a thick plume of black smoke rose. Then Philip sat down to nurse his eyes. Cupping his hands over them to shut out the sun and smoke, he asked me to try and find him the same type of leaves the old woman had used as bandages. I stepped back into the jungle. None of the leaves looked familiar. I brought back an armful and let him pick.
I stood on the dune beside him and kept watch.
The sun continued its arc across the cloudless sky, the sea turned as flat as an ironed sheet, the horizon was a leaden pencil line dividing emptiness from nothing.
Around noon, thirsty, dizzy, desperate to spot something, I swore I saw the sky tear open and discharge a flying speck. I shrieked, “A plane! A plane!” But it turned out to be an albatross.
Philip finally removed the leaf poultices and tried to help me with the search, but he still couldn’t focus on anything farther away than his outstretched hand.
We spent the night on the sheltered end of the beach, in a shallow cave notched into the base of a limestone cliff, huddled together spoon-fashion despite our sand-crusted, sunburnt bodies. We didn’t dare lie face-to-face.
Two baked yams awaited us in the embers of our signal fire the next morning. We ate them in hot, tasteless fistfuls. That afternoon brought only a flock of white terns and an enormous gray pelican. The pelican landed on our diminishing woodpile, fluffed up its oily feathers, and surveyed the horizon with us. I think it was looking for its own kind, too. It only flew away when I tried to catch it for dinner.