I can’t remember.
There is a painter here named Annie. You’re obsessed with her.
“Annie, she’s a feral artist,” you told me. We were in the lodge kitchen. The cook was chopping parsley for dinner at the long wooden countertop. Bottles of wine on the long mahogany table Billy made, your iPod on the counter. The Beach Boys, Outkast, “Hey Ya.” Happy music. The cook was dancing. “She gets up every day before the sun comes up and goes out to her rock and just stays there all day, waiting.”
“For what?”
“Who the fuck knows. The right moment. The final curtain. She stays there all day, she only comes back here at dinnertime to eat. She doesn’t talk much. She paints, just this one spot. Her rock. She’s been coming here for three years now. I don’t know when she sleeps, she works all night and goes out again at 4 a.m.”
Annie.
That night I met her at dinner. Tall, rawboned, long straight straw-colored hair. Slightly rough skin, wide-set gray eyes. She wore stained khakis, a blue sweater, ancient hip waders. Big hands, the nails chewed down to nothing. She spoke very softly, her gaze flickering around the room the whole time.
“So you just go out there and work?” I asked. We were drinking red wine, moving slowly around the perimeter of the room. Annie kept her head down, her hair obscuring her face. Now and then she’d look aside, furtively, then gaze at me head-on for a moment before turning.
“Yes.” Her voice soft, without affect yet musical. A swallow’s voice. “On the far side of the island. By the rocks. Those trees there.” She held her wineglass in one hand and kept the other hand in her pocket. “That tree. Yes.”
“And you just… wait?”
She looked up. Her eyes flared. “Yes.”
Her expression never changed; only those eyes. As though something moved inside her skull, cutting off the light. “Yes,” she murmured again, and walked away.
“You know what I started to think about?”
You stared out at the edge of the woods, cat fir and moss-covered boulders, birch trees. Sea urchin shells broken on the rocks. “A woman having sex with a dog. Like a wolf or something. If she tries to get away, it rips her throat out.”
I laughed. “I would never say something like that.”
“Yeah. A really big dog.”
Each cabin contains a single bed—a cot, really—so narrow it can barely hold one person, let alone two. At night I lie beside you as you sleep, your head turned from me, your arms curled up in front of your face, your fingers curled. Like one of those bodies at Pompeii. On the windowsills burn candles in small glasses. The smell of smoke on everything. My own skin; my mouth. Everything burns.
You asked me, “Have you noticed how you can smell things here?” We sat on the cabin steps, sheltered beneath cat firs, and watched rain spatter the rocky beach below us. “Things you never notice back there, you can smell them here. I can, anyway. Like I can smell my brother when he’s way down the path. And Annie—I went down to her place yesterday and I knew she wasn’t there, because I couldn’t smell her.”
“Can you smell me?”
You stared out at the water graying beneath the storm. “No. You smell like me.”
“The light,” I said. “That’s what’s different for me. The light everywhere, it’s so bright but I can look right at it. I can stare at the sun. Have you noticed that?”
“No. I mean, a little, maybe. I guess it’s being on an island—the water everywhere, and the sky. It must all reflect off the rocks.”
“I guess.” I blinked and it hurt. Even with my glasses on, the dark lenses—my eyes ached. I turned and looked at you. “Hold still, there’s something caught…”
You grimaced as I touched your tooth. “A piece of fluff,” I said, and scraped it onto my finger. “There.”
I stared at the tiny matted wad on my fingertip. At first I thought it was feathers, or a frayed bit of cloth. But when I held it up to the light I saw it was a minute clump of hair, silky, silvery-white.
“That’s weird,” I said, and flicked it into the rain.
That evening before dinner I stood on the porch at the lodge and stared out to sea. The wind so strong I wondered about the windmill, that sound like an airplane preparing for takeoff, steady thump and drone. When the wind dies, the windmill stops turning. Power fluctuates, the lights flicker and fail then shine once more. A vast black wedge of cloud loomed above the reach and sent spurs of lightning across the water. Each bolt seared my eyes, my nails left little half-moons in my arms but I didn’t look away.
“You should be careful.” Annie came up beside me, wrapped in a brown sweatshirt with yellow stripes. She pulled the hood up, her hands invisible inside the sleeves. “It will hurt you.”
“Lightning? From way out there?” I laughed, but turned so she wouldn’t see my face. Your shirt. “I think I’m okay here.”
“Not lightning.” She crouched beside me. The hood spilled over her forehead so that it was difficult to discern her features, anything but her eyes. “Oh, poor thing—”
She reached for a citronella candle in a large, netted glass holder. A brown leaf the size of my hand protruded from the opening. Annie tilted the glass towards her, wincing, then stroked the edge of the leaf.
“Polyphemous,” she said.
It wasn’t a leaf, but the remains of a moth, forewing and hindwing, each longer than my finger. The color of browned butter, edged with pale-orange, with a small eyespot on the forewing and a larger eyespot on the hindwing. The spots were the same vivid sea-blue as your eyes but ringed with black, as though the eye had been kohled. Within a sheath of yellow wax I could glimpse its body, like a furred thumb, its long feathered antenna and the other wing, charred, ragged.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “That’s so sad.”
She lifted her finger, brown scales on the tip like soot. “The eyes, when it opens its wings suddenly they look like an owl’s eyes.”
She set down the candle and pressed her hands together, palm to palm, then spread them. “See? That’s how it scares off whatever tries to eat it.”
“What’re you looking at?”
You came up the steps, stopped beside Annie and glanced down at the candle.
“It’s a moth,” I said.
“A Polyphemous moth,” said Annie.
You stared at it then laughed. “What a way to go, huh?”
You lit another cigarette. I held out my hand and you gave me the lighter. I flicked it and stared at the flame, brought it so close to my face that I felt a hot pulse between my eyes, you and Annie blurred into lightning.
“Hey,” you said. “Watch it.”
“She keeps doing that,” said Annie.