Do you get to drink on board? I ask. I’m trying to sound as if I am his age or I once was and did a lot of drinking and maybe drugs too, but of course it fails. I forget my face and how surely it’s hardened from a different past than his, and he gobbles another fearsome bite of his quarter-pounder with fries and says tonight is their party, it’s a week early, they’ve got to get to the next island and the water is rough, so there won’t be much drinking.
I fork through my meat and turn it over. What else? I suppose you’ve seen a lot of water, I say, you’ve probably surfed in a lot of incredible places.
He says, Yes. He brightens. Lots. And most of them look like this one, he says. He names an archipelago or two of even more far-flung islands, says the sharks are bad on some of them, but then, they glow in the dark, why worry?
He stops because his food is almost gone, because I’m staring at him, because he should. He laughs. Glow in the dark, he repeats, shaking his head at his own joke.
What if I don’t test out?
Well, they’ll give you a few more tests, and maybe some treatment. It’s not that you want to be in any hurry not to take the tests. But don’t worry, you were hardly exposed at all. Not like them. He points the chewed end of his red meat to where they sit as if they are already dead, not eating.
Where do you put the trash? I ask.
He points to a hole next to the serving area. I push in all of the brightly colored foods so they tumble into the dark that trash makes, and Ngarima comes up to me.
Don’t sleep, she says. Ghosts will get you when you sleep. She looks as if she has locked her eyes again, the way you do on the island to sleep in the day.
~ ~ ~
Stars in absolute excess, I gulp stars in my breathlessness, swinging through the last door off the stairs that finally lead up and out, and she is sitting on the cold metal deck, her legs drawn up, her eyes on the smoke that curls but does not drift into the stillness of the star-packed air. She is a civilian now, or at least the lab coat’s gone, her clipboard’s stowed — nothing she holds protects her. She jerks her cup back toward her toes, away from me.
Not that I threaten her, not that I come toe to toe. I am bathing in stars. We sit in absolute dark here, an aurora borealis in reverse, black paint sucking the stars closer than even the stars on the island, which will surely someday set fire to the tops of the palms, fronds waving once too often against their white light.
’Tis the season. She offers me a shot, which I take. And I take a second one, and one more before she says it’s not her bottle.
As many islands as there are stars, I say, toasting her. You like working for this corporation?
She levers herself up from the deck, weaving a little, smoothing her way forward with her feet. They give you a house at the facility, it’s okay, she says. It’s a very modern place.
It must be hard. I stand too.
A lot of medicine is hard. I try not to think about it.
I’m good at that.
We talk, and the dark starts to spin with words, which I try to hold on to. I ask what I need to ask, Are you the one in charge?
No.
Okay. So who is in charge? I ask.
She leans on the railing, leans as if this is why they’re installed, not to keep people in but to let them lean. Below, she signals with a hand off that railing. He hardly ever comes up, not even at night. He could be in Bellevue instead of the ocean, he could be in Persia, he’s a thousand-and-one-nights kind of guy. He’s the one.
She’s maybe more drunk than I am.
It was an accident, you know, she says.
I know what an accident is, I say.
The captain will like my story about the island, I say. In my story, children hide under it as if it were just a spoon to be overturned. But instead of being served up in a mouthful, they come up through the sand as jelly.
I stop, I go on. The important part of the story is why they are hiding.
They should hide, she says at last.
No — not children, they shouldn’t, I say. What have they done?
Her smoke triples in the wait.
It’s nice you don’t lock us up, I say.
She dumps ash onto the deck. You’re guests, you’re volunteers.
Can I change my mind?
She stubs out her smoke. I say before she can answer — because yes or no isn’t relevant, because it isn’t my mind I want to change — See which way the palms grow on that island? Have you ever actually looked at this island?
She glances over. The island’s backlit by stars. Left, she says, they grow left.
Trade winds, I say. They never blow any other way. Now, if it were all an accident, this Bravo thing, which is what the husband of the woman you have here who is screaming so much calls what happened, if it were all a big accident, if it were just a big mistake that they made, letting the cloud spew itself up, up, up and be borne by the wind, wouldn’t you have to know which way it would go? Wouldn’t you have looked at the palms at least? See that speck a hundred miles away, you said, that’s nothing, there’s just people in the way. Or maybe, Let the wind blow a little that way and then we can see what’s what with a few people. Even the gravestones blew that way.
Okay, okay, she says. I didn’t do it.
Did I? I ask. Before she can suck in another star off the deck or drink from her cup again, I try another voice: “Studies show that in paradise, sex is paramount, that the natives reproduce like rats”—do you hear a voice like that rising in wonder, envy, lust, do you hear it tinged with the amoral curiosity of science, some boy-scientist speaking who tears the wings off six generations of flies to see if it affects their reproductive abilities, their, you know, sex?
Our parents elected those people, I say, and we keep them in place.
She has already walked away.
The stars are still there. Hot little islands.
I stroll past a card game. The little girl from the island squats beside it. I sit down and take her on my lap, though she resists, she tries to squirm away from me in fear because I have never held her or any of them, never comforted their boo-boos or said sorry. At least she knows who I am, I am not the drinking woman. But of course I have no Band-Aid for her, no Band-Aid with some animal on it that children like printed on the side that’s not sticky, I don’t even have words she’d like to hear, home or get well, so there we struggle.
I let her go. I leave the stars for the stairs, for the very bottom of the stairs, where the doors are hot with engines behind them. Some are open, so I don’t have to knock, I don’t have to call out over the machines, O Captain! My Captain!
Of course, he could be sleeping. It is night, and on a boat any time is all the time, they have watches and they take turns and surely even captains sleep.
Nothing promises anything inside room after room: the machines and their couplings fill them almost to the ceiling the way plants do, a thick blooming, but one room does divide and through that burrowing division must lie its reason.
He smokes and wears a tiny hat. It’s the kind you wear for building expressways or putting I-beams into buildings, but it’s the wrong size, the size real estate salesmen wear when they’re saying it’s in move-in condition, the one that sits on the head and teeters. Despite the hat, he’s in charge, he’s no missionary-in-a-helmet. He doesn’t bother to look up when I enter his high-tech lamp light, not even when I cast a shadow in his smoke.