All Laws in Limbo
T H E R E ’ S a policy. Maybe agreement is a better word. An understanding. One is hesitant to introduce words like policy when there is an opportunity to live outside the cage of bureaucracies. So let’s go with understanding. The understanding is that a person in need of a pill doesn’t have to disclose what the pill did or why they needed it. They must only describe the pill. Give its physical description with as much detail as they can recall. I will then go about the task of making it.
I guess that makes me the island pharmacist of sorts, but really I’m just a sculptor—a pill-maker in the most superficial sense. A pharmacist would be more concerned with the substance of the pill, naturally, whereas I only want it to look and feel right. Look-and-feel goes a long way. When you think about it, I’m really just making avatars, but we all know by now that avatars have their own power. And I’m surprised how I’ve taken to it! I can get very intensely focused and single-minded about crafting something with my hands, turns out, obsessed with aesthetic detail—size, texture, smoothness, color. It’s my contention that, if I get it right, the pill will work as it should. As it is expected to work.
As it has.
After Terese’s hands stopped shaking, Graham, so eager to appear a step ahead, shrugged and said: “Placebo.”
He said it again when Suchita claimed to feel much better. Whatever had been ailing her had apparently been addressed by the small white pill I had custom crafted, based on her recollections, from taro dust and coconut milk.
“Pla-ce-bo!” Graham said, this time more shrilly, more shruggy.
I rushed to silence him. Not just because by identifying the trick, by naming it, you spoil the trick, but also because I don’t think it’s a trick—or, at least, not that trick. Mind over matter. The conversation makes me yawn. It places everything within, when I like the idea that it’s not within, it’s beyond. So I yawn in his face. My yawn against his shrug in our gestural rochambeau. Graham would never understand that it’s about a certain aesthetic alignment earning cosmic endorsement!
This proclamation is directed at people sitting around the nightly fire, their faces edged in orange, blinking before constellations of sparks. They are talking about how much they miss their phones. Some still hold theirs — or one they found in the wreckage—black screens, dead weight in their hands. They ignore my utterances so I hold forth to the fronds. It’s about it looking and feeling right — being right — and the universe agreeing, allowing and endorsing, because the details were correct. Size, texture, smoothness, color. How else to explain what happened to Jesse, who couldn’t recall the exact hue of his prescribed capsule? His neurotic attacks and outbursts increased as I tried a variety flesh tones. “It’s skin colored,” he said.
“Whose skin?” I asked. I pointed at my brown arm. He shook his head. His state worsened, the voices getting louder, insistent, until he threw himself into our modest volcano. An unforeseen development for castaways whose meds perished in the wreckage of an Airbus A350.
Graham, who was a psychology professor pre-crash (hence, his insistence on being the Professor for our upcoming Gilligan’s Island party), used the opportunity to lecture me. Let’s remember that the most important ingredient of a sugar pill is belief, not the proverbial sugar. It wasn’t that I hadn’t gotten the color right, he suggested. The problem was that Jesse simply didn’t believe. Miracles require it.
Oh, Graham. One time he fell asleep under a cumquat tree and a monkey shit on his forehead. It’s my belief that the stool seeped through his creased brow, slipped past his skull and settled into his brain.
“There’s more to it,” I say now.
“What’s that you say?” Atul asks, turning away from the fire to where I sit in the shadows. His face is long, his goat-like appearance helped along by the snowy white scruff on his chin. He has kind eyes.
There’s what we believe and what the Universe is likely to endorse. They aren’t always the same thing.
Atul nods nearly imperceptibly. “Got it.”
“More ramblings,” someone says on the other side of the flaming pit.
“He should make a pill for himself. A pill to stop making pills. And to stop talking about making pills.”
This was Doug, I knew, though he tried to hide behind a whisper.
I heard Trent performatively guffaw. Even then, angling.
“Come, come,” Terese said gently, her French-Canadian accent hanging like a string of lights on her words. “We all have our ways of coping.”
Coping? Coping with what? She must mean my failure to save Jesse, I assume. Jesse begged me for help. I need my fucking meds, man! If I had just gotten the hue right—pink like Trent’s areola, Jesse finally proclaimed—he’d be here now, helping butcher a kindly hog on the far side of the island, glazing his face in blood as he liked to do, looking like a Peking duck in a Chinatown window. Jesse had some savage habits. Then the lava—that molten lotion—cured him of everything.
Someone shifted a log. The sparks swarmed, swam up to be lost among the low-hanging spray of stars, just like Jesse.
“Poor, Jesse,” I whispered. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
I T was while walking Trent around the island, trying to match his areolae to a color found in the natural world, that he revealed his own need for a pill. This is how it was. They mocked me in front of the others, then privately sought me out.
“What was it like?” I asked as I held the seeds and petals of various plants against his fleshy nipple fringe.
“It’s not worth discussing,” he said, reversing. “I regret mentioning it.”
He was English. Formal by default, at least to my San Diego County way of hearing things.
I stood back, studied his delicate, doughboy face. It was easy to imagine him standing on the bomb-cratered sand in Dunkirk, desperately watching the sea. He was a sunburned white boy with full lips, a deep philtrum. Long, aquiline nose with, consequently, long nostrils, an elegant bridge supporting a thoughtful brow. I assumed this was about hair loss, given his receding line, the sky roaring blue beyond his semi-gloss pate. He had recently started staying in Doug’s hut and perhaps this had triggered a resurgence in self-regard. After all, he had checked out the straight-razor from the toiletry trunk and used it to shave off his scraggly beard, though the stubble was already bristling from his sharp jawline. I had watched them walk hand-in-hand on the black sand beach and his posture was a hieroglyph for happy. But now, he seemed troubled.
“It’s just that—” he started.
I cut him off, raising my hand to his mouth. “Remember the understanding,” I said. “I don’t need to know. Just tell me what the pill looked like.”
“You’ll know when I tell you.”
“There’s a good chance I won’t.” I explained that much of my knowledge didn’t survive the crash.
“How’s that?”
“I don’t remember certain things. Most things. Only the stupid things.”
“Truly?”
“Some general shapes. It’s like a room filled with furniture but the furniture is covered with black drop cloths.”
“That’s quite descriptive, that.”
He looked at me with pity. I shrugged.
“But you know the song!”
“The song.”
“The program. The theme song for the program. Gulliver’s Island.”
“Gilligan’s.”
“Right. That. How can you remember that and not…other things?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was true though—a sad purgatorial detail. I remember the detritus of capitalist culture, like garbage barge I’m forced to carry on my back. The blast radius of my mind littered with pop minutiae. While the more meaningful aspects of a life remain buried or obliterated.
I changed the subject. “Do you think your areolae have changed color?” I asked. I leaned in and squinted.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are they sunburnt?”
He looked down and took in one, then the other. “I don’t think so?”
“You shouldn’t fall asleep in the sun,” I said. “Especially on the black sand beach. It’s bad for your skin. Also, it throws the color off.”
He said nothing as I led him to a tidepool, a dazzling well of colors. There was an anemone there, its pink tentacles combing the water for flecks of sustenance. I looked at the lightly puckered ring of color around his nipple, then at the tentacle, then at the nipple. Nipple, tentacle, nipple, tentacle.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, man,” Trent said of my head swivel.
It looked close in color, a near match. How would I get the that color from the anemone tentacle into a pill? I pondered. This was a problem I had discovered. You can find a color but how to transfer it onto the small, swallowable sculptures? These are the questions that launched the very notion of science in our collective past. He stood with the clear, warm water lapping at his ankles, while Jesse, unbeknownst to us, clutched at his roaring skull and started up the summit.
“It was like Terese’s eyes,” only bluer, he blurted.
“What’s that?”
“The pill.”
“Oh.” I tried to picture her eyes. A deep blue, almost violet. Liz Taylor-ish.
“And shaped like a diamond,” Trent added reluctantly. He stooped a bit, surrendering. I patted his shoulder at the disclosure.
A fish swam up then and turned on its side at our feet. It was beautifully colored, I noted. A silver-to-yellow gradient.
“Should we take it?” I said.
“I think we have plenty,” Trent said.
We watched it wait, then drift off in dejection when we declined to lift it into our hands, club it, gut it, cook it on a hot rock, break it with our teeth into manageable swallows, process it with our innards, and shit the useless elementals into the clay-lined toilet trough on the south side of the island.
T H A T ' S an odd thing about this island. We had all heard of Darwin’s astonishment at the naivete of the animals on Galapagos. Maybe that’s happening here, on this uncharted realm of abundance. They just aren’t used to the human presence and all the dangers that poses. But the place’s hospitality seems to go beyond that. It has been oddly eager to host humans, addressing our many vulnerabilities with what seems like an intelligence—something like foresight and cosmic consideration. The setting serves us with, dare I say, a human-centric user experience in mind. This after we crashed an airliner into its brow. Here the animals—tapir, boars, some kind of pygmy hippo—approach without fear, offering up their bodies, their throats to be gently slit. Blinking up at us as they bleed out. Water summons us with a gentle burble to sip from tidy volcanic sluices lined with cool ferns or pooled in flute-shaped blossoms. Parrots hum and harmonize in the protective canopy overhead while their plump, flightless cousins, some kind of jungle fowl, fall at our feet, if not into our fires.
Even fire is offered in the form of accessible vent holes at the base of our volcano. One only needs to dip a long bamboo pole with a knot of thatch tied to one end—like a giant Q-tip—and extract it, now tipped with snapping flames. Clothing isn’t an issue either. The climate is perfectly agreeable and there are no biting bugs, so it’s not like we need an extra layer of fabric protection. For modesty’s sake, however, we wear clothes salvaged from the suitcases of the wreck, which were strewn throughout the jungle below the site, like enormous easter eggs. We had gathered them up. Or rather, some of us had gathered them, organized them, hung the articles of clothing from bamboo pools under a rocky overhang. I did not help with this. I had pills to make, prescriptions to fill. But occasionally, I would go to the Fashion Grotto, as Suchita likes to call it, and pick something out.
Some, like Atul, went so far as to suggest this was the afterlife. Paradise. Heaven. This didn’t seem plausible to most of us. After all, we still suffer to some degree. People still die. One hundred and sixty or so perished in the crash, for example. So maybe they were sorted by the cosmic hand, sent elsewhere, while their bodies were conveniently fed into our natural crematorium, the volcano, sparing us the grim task of digging a mass grave. What about Jesse, who threw himself in after several weeks as a castaway? He never resurfaced from the lava, showing up the next day at the breakfast fire like nothing had happened, like some kind of Groundhog Day reset. He’s gone. Where did he go?
"But, this place," Atul waves his arms at the gentle jungle, the thermal pools and fruits piling at the foot of broad-leafed trees. "It’s too good to be true! Don’t you think?"
Maybe. But maybe we’re so used to life being difficult that we suspect life itself when it isn’t. This is Graham’s proposal. And, anyway, if this is paradise, why does Natasha’s alopecia persist, even worsen? Are we still to go bald in the afterlife? Suffer soft erections and crippling menstrual cramps? Waver when we stand, light-headed from hypertension or a potassium deficiency?
Endure black gaps in our memory?
I decide not to engage the larger existential questions. I would focus. Micro, not macro. Be bound in a nutshell, or rather, a capsule. It’s easy to keep those thoughts confined when you don’t have memories to provoke them. I wallow in my blank state, curl up in a womb of nothingness. All I want to do is make pills with nothing in them.
T H E R E are two ways to do this that I’ve developed so far—molding and sculpting. Both involve carving to some degree. I have a sharp piece of metal that I use as a chisel. I was also fortunate to find a scalpel in one of the tool stations—which are actually serving carts that we salvaged from the wreckage and filled with all the useful implements we could find scattered along the crash site. I use it to contour the small blanks I make out of various ingredients—mostly the dried powder of a water root I believe is taro, or something similar, pollen, ash, and some kind of naturally occurring chalk Trent found in a cave on the north shore. He was using it for sign-making (“Please do not defecate in the fire ring.”) I stole a piece, ate it. Given that there were no ill effects, I started using it.
I milk slime from eels to use as a binding material. It also adds some gloss. For colors, I’ve founded that fruit juices, berries, roots, stems, leaves, different colors drawn from soil can produce a range of colors. More than needed for pills, since most are white, though blues, beiges, browns, dull greens, according to those who have made requests, are possible.
I’m mixing colors in a lava mortal, using a heavy knob of some kind found in the wreckage as a pestle, when Graham shambles up the path. He bends to sniff at a flower, inhaling deeply, before reaching my camp perimeter.
“May I enter?” he asks.
“I’m working,” I say.
He enters anyway and watches me work for a beat. “What’s that knob?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a gear shift.”
“Do planes have gears?”
I ignore the question.
“At any rate, it looks quite handy.”
“It is.”
He stands there, waiting until I look up from what I’m grinding into dust.
“Have you heard about the Gilligan Island party?” he asks. I study him, taking in his scraggly beard and long, wavy hair. Graham has actually gained weight since our fiery arrival on the island. His third-trimester gut looks hard, leathery, jutting out from his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, like he would be greatly relieved if it were to be punctured. If only to let the air out, which would leave his body with a flatulent sputter. His thin, nearly hairless legs serve as frail pillars for the famous bulge in his blue Speedos. His look doesn’t match his manner, which is ultimately that of an annoying know-it-all. But, really, he’s not so bad. No one here is, which is another surreal blessing. I truly want to help them all. I tell myself to lighten up.
“I have, yes.”
I drop a few dried lime rinds into the bowl and start pulverizing it with the knob. The citrus smell reminds me of something, but I can’t say what.
“Don’t you think it’s a fun idea?”
“Sure,” I shrug. “Something to do, anyway.”
“You’re familiar with the show then? You recall it?”
“More than I’d like.”
That’s how it is. Somethings, the most worthless things, are still there and readily available to my mind. Just like a million jingles or plots of bad movies. The crash has burned a hole in my mind, erasing itself. I don’t remember the crash. I don’t remember getting on the plane, in fact. I don’t remember a single book I may have read, but I remember that Gilligan had white bucket hat.
“That’s great. Well, it would be wonderful if you could put your work aside for a bit and give us a hand.”
“With what?”
“Well, with explaining the show—Gilligan’s Island, that is—to those of us who don’t know much about it. You Americans, you and Doug, could give a brief presentation, so we all know what we’re doing.”
“You didn’t have Gilligan’s Island in Canada, Graham?”
“I’m afraid not. Other shows, but not that one.”
“It’s a pretty stupid show,” I say. “You’re actually lucky it’s not in your skull, taking up space.”
“Well, it’s all in good fun. We need to have fun, wouldn’t you say? Fun is important for our collective health. And it’s the perfect theme for a party, given the circumstances. Very meta.”
He waits for a response. I know that it will cause more trouble than it’s worth to say no, but might as well leave him hanging for a bit. I grind away with the knob.
“So…?”
“Okay, fine. Just let me get back to work.”
“So you’ll do it! Fantastic!”
“Yep.”
“That’s great. Wonderful.”
“Okay.”
I lean into the mortar and blow lightly on the dust I made there. I can feel him hovering, letting the opportunity for a timely goodbye slip past.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s just that—”
“Just that what?”
“Well, some people, someone, recalls that you were with others on the plane. You don’t recollect that?” I look up at him, beyond him, into the dark jungle. Machete-thick at edge of my campsite. I wonder if someone is in there, watching us. Someone that moves just beyond range of senses, in the peripheral, always on the opposite side of the tree, the outcropping, the island itself. An escaped shadow, maybe, an upright ape cloaked in black fur—each hair a stroke of dark matter. Graham shifts his weight, swiveling to follow my gaze, only to swing it back on me when he realizes there’s nothing there.
“There’s nothing there,” I say, validating both his senses and mine.
“You don’t recall a woman? Your wife, perhaps?”
“Who said this?” I asked.
“Never mind who said it. That’s not important. What might be important is for you to try to remember.”
“Why?”
“Well, for the sake of wholeness, don’t you think? For the sake of knowing who you are?”
“I don’t see how that’s important anymore.”
I turn to the pill at hand, setting down the knob. I’ve been trying to carve a little band around it with the scalpel, in response to how Doug described it. It’s hard to get the line straight, the relief consistent. I do not have the precision of machines. Can you imagine? What a marvel—mass producing such beautiful things! Graham is still standing there, and it’s starting to piss me off. I mean, had I not already agreed to participate in their party?
“So you—”
“NO!” I shout.
The word no is a void you cast into others. It’s an extension of your own black emptiness. It opens up inside him like an umbrella, carving at the walls of his soul.
W E have to explain Gilligan’s Island to some of the more youthful and/or non-North American among us. This proves to be more challenging than expected. I am of sufficient age to recall the generalities. I can’t remember the specific episodes, but know the opening song (just as I know the jingles for a thousand products) and the characters, so my input is considered essential our attempt to resurrect it. I took a break from my work and joined the circle. The other Yank, Doug, who is destined to play the Skipper, fills in the blanks and even seems to carry with him, in the wet creases of his mind, some of the actual storylines and plot points. We explain it at the nightly fire like this:
There were seven castaways: The Skipper, the millionaire couple, Mr. and Mrs. Howl, the movie star, Ginger, the girl next door, Maryann, the Professor and, of course, the village idiot, Gilligan.
The Professor made useful implements. A bamboo Geiger counter. A syringe.
He made phones, I think.
The Howls had a luxurious hut. Parasols.
Are you saying Howl?
Wasn’t that it?
I think it was Howell.
Okay, whatever. I don’t see—
The Skipper and Gilligan had a Laurel and Hardy thing going. Fatty and Skinny. Abbott and Costello, maybe, but more physical. Not really about wordplay.
The Skipper was an oaf and prone to violent outbursts. He often hit Gilligan with his own hat.
Gilligan had a white hat and a red shirt with a white collar. I can’t recall his pants. He really was a goof, a dweeb. Sometimes you wanted to see him beaten.
That’s dark, Doug.
Don’t pretend you didn’t.
Ginger expected to be treated like a star, even on a desert isle. Whereas Maryann was easy going, familiar. It seemed like she and the Professor had something going off-camera. In between episodes. Maybe the Professor was also hooking up with Ginger. He was the only sexually viable male. I watched for it. It was subtle but it was there.
Maybe this Ginger and this Maryann were hooking up with each other, Terese said. Did you ever consider that?
We pondered it. Doug picked up the thread: I always wondered if Ginger was actually a man.
What?
Her femininity was so exaggerated. It was drag, wasn’t it?
She was supposed to be a Marilyn.
Exactly.
They went on a three-hour tour.
The weather started getting rough. The tiny ship was tossed.
I think they were stranded for years, decades. They developed their own society, just as we have. They became a great nation-state, eventually. I think they became New Zealand.
Now you’ve gone off script, Doug.
Who’s to say they didn’t? The show ended. They stopped telling the story when it was no longer profitable but the story didn’t stop. Once a story starts it never stops. You can keep it going however you want in here. Doug taps his sunburned head. Trent leans over and kisses the spot he had tapped, which is marked with a faint, dissipating whiteness.
And so you choose to think they became New Zealand? Why not?
Okay, but it doesn’t work historically, geographically, none of it works. If you went with the nation-state thing, I think it would make more sense to make up a nation, rather than try to graft it onto reality. It doesn’t neatly link up. Make up an imaginary country then you aren’t in any way restricted and you side-step the nagging impulse to make connections and alignments with reality as we know it.
Naw, Doug says, smiling. New Zealand.
I resist engaging further, though I find Doug’s suggestion ludicrous. I have work to do, so I stand and leave. I feel their eyes on my back.
W E E K S ago, maybe months, I was stooped over in one of the ponds, digging out taro root, standing upright for stretches to let the blood that had gathered in my head find its way south. I could see pieces of the plane catching sunlight on the summit. Our volcano jutting into the sky like a geological pout. It was a stunning place to nearly die. The sky running through a sequence of colors on the daily: pinks, oranges, reds, blues spilling into indigo. Never toxic. Always tastefully subdued, gentle gradients, until the final stages of light, when the sun panics as though suddenly recognizing its demise. It does not go gently. Its rage is breathtaking.
I was taking in the sunset when Terese emerged from the woods and waved me over the shore. I waded over.
“Quite the show,” Terese said, nodding toward the sky.
“Amazing.”
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said.
“Time for a refill?”
“Yes, for the other. But there’s something else too.”
She hugged herself. Her hand massaged the opposite elbow, like she was adjusting a setting, perhaps making her arm longer.
“What else?”
“Well,” she said, “I honestly think it would be helpful if I could tell you. Not just describe the pill, but really tell you the details of the ailment.”
I studied her. She was a tall thin woman, with cropped silver hair. She has it cut by Suchita every week. Swimming was her way of staying in shape, and she often did laps in this very lagoon. To my eye, she was the picture of health, other than the tremble in her hands, which we had addressed. I did not look too closely though.
“I think we’ve proven that those details don’t matter,” I said.
“Well, in this case, I think they do.”
Her face shifted slightly, so that a desperation was suddenly visible, at least along the hem of her expression. Her eyes welling.
“Maybe we can sit?” She gestured to a log on the shore. “It’s a rather long story, I’m afraid.” I looked at the log, still standing ankle deep in the warm water. She started toward it, assuming I would follow. Instead, I backed into the water, slowly submerging even as she called out to me.
W H E N they bring out the red shirt, I recoil. You have the reedy physique they say. You have the beardless face. I’m still feeling guilty about failing to save Jesse, as well as yelling at Graham, so I take it and, putting it on, agree to be the Gilligan to Doug’s Skipper and Graham’s Professor. Terese is our Ginger and Suchita our Maryann. Doug looks the most like his character—he has the belly for it, if not the blue shirt. He has fashioned a captain’s hat from a white leather handbag. Atul is Mr. Howell and Trent, wearing a green polyester pantsuit and scarf, is Mrs. Howell.
We eat at the long table, heaped with fruit plates of glistening papaya and mango slices, medallions of breadfruit like the pink iris of a cyclops eye, wooden platters of fish and meat, gourds of seaweed salad and steamed clams. All provided by the island which almost seemed to have a sinister agenda—like the house of candy encountered by Hansel and Gretel. What are its intentions beneath all this abundance? To fatten us, perhaps. To lull us into complacency. Then what? Plunge us into its volcanic digestive system like living lumpia, savoring the island flavors we have ingested, now mingled with our fleshy human husks, seasoned with micro-plastics, synthetic fibers and unprocessed aspartame. A delicacy, no doubt, to the island’s molten tongue.
After we down several tiny bottles of airline booze, Doug lures me into singing the song by purposely getting the lyrics wrong. “Just sit right back,” he implores, as Trent strummed an autoharp found mostly intact on the western slope, apparently tossed two hundred yards by basic physics. “…And you’ll hear us tell…”
“And you’ll hear a tale,” I correct. They all look at me to continue. When I remained silent, Doug tries again.
“A tale of a fateful trip. It started on this tropic shore, about this tiny ship.”
I sing, begrudgingly: “It started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship.”
“Go on then,” Trent says, strumming the chord on his cracked harp.
We share a smile.
“The weather started getting rough and the tiny ship was tossed,” I sing. “If not for the courage of the of the fearless crew…”
Doug joins in with, “The Minnow would be lost. The Minnow would be lost.”
We sing the remaining lines together, to the delight and wonderment of our fellow castaways, and I find myself leaning into it, standing at my place at the table, bellowing the words up at the stars. “Here on Gilligan’s Isle!”
When we finish, everyone applauds. I have to admit, it feels good. Maybe this party wasn’t such a ridiculous idea, after all.
Then Terese leans across the table for the bamboo pitcher of fermented guava juice and I can’t help studying her hand for any tremors. I’m pleased to see the steadiness. She’s our Ginger, indeed. My gaze travels up her wrist, along her slender forearms, the sinewy bicep, and up to her shoulder where it stops on the glittering spaghetti strap of her evening gown. The strap—the sight of it—was enough, but I venture on and take in the dress itself. It’s cut low, layered with sparkling fringe. Carbonated, I remember once saying about it, in the dressing room at Anthropologie. Effervescent, a voice said, correcting me. She always had the better word.
My wife. Of course, I had a wife.
I had a wife and this was her dress. Terese is wearing my dead wife’s dress.
I retch, double over, feeling my heart flopping in my chest, running on electricity like a headless bird. It’s hard to breathe. Sweat pours from my skin.
The castaways jump to their feet. They push the feast from the table and lay me down on it.
“Is it a heart attack?” Terese asks.
Graham, who is holding my wrist, pressing at my pulse, shrugs.
“An allergic reaction maybe,” Trent offers. “To the shellfish?”
“I don’t think so. More like a panic attack.”
“A panic attack?” Terese says. My head is in her lap. She is stroking my cheek, pushing the sweat-damp hair from my eyes. I’m groaning. My soul itself has a terrible, crippling cramp. Terese has a small clutch, partly burned on the corner and covered with white beads. It nearly matches the dress, but not quite. From it she pulls a tiny white object, one of the beads maybe. A pearl she found in an oyster, perhaps. No. It’s one of mine. A tiny sculpture. She places it on my tongue. Atul leans in with a coconut shell ladle of water, spills it into my mouth. The pill goes down in the tide.
“Where? I manage to say.”
“Where? What where?” they ask.
“The dress. Where?”
Everyone looks at Terese’s dress. “The Grotto,” she says, like Grotto is the name of store. It’s all from the Grotto.
I rise to my elbows, feel I can stand. Do. They try to steady me, then try to get me to at least sit, to relax. But I push them away, aside. I grab the nearest torch and start into the jungle, toward the outcropping where the clothes hang. Each article inhabited, worn, by ghosts. But I can’t find my way in the dark. There are no trails. The others follow, wrestle the flames from my hands, but I push through the plants and vines, clutching at my chest as they fall back. Monkeys and parrots screech in the canopy. I risk a glance back. There stands the cast of a terrible TV show, real castaways dressed as fake ones, holding torches in the jungle. Calling me back by a name that isn’t mine.
I leave them behind, my breathing ragged inside my red shirt. Tears glazing my cheeks and snot hanging from my face in strands. I stumble, lean against tree trunks, until I collapse onto a heap of ferns. Evaline. That was her name. How she clutched my arm as the hard tilt pushed us into our seats and catastrophe rushed up at us. There was nothing I could do for her. Blackness seeps in from the edges like squid ink clouding the tide pool. The pill, I realize. The one I had made for Terese, that she had dropped in my mouth, pulling the curtains closed.
I’m out for the remainder of the night, possibly an entire day. Possibly a week, a month, a year. Passed out, dreamless, on the leaf-littered floor of an enchanted forest. I’m awoken by something entering my mouth, pecking at my tongue. Groggy, I push it away and grit my teeth, seal my lips, but it lunges forward — a dove, its shoulders shimmer with blue-green iridescence. Wanting in, wanting to be eaten, devoured in accordance with an unnatural directive. All laws in limbo.
I cover my mouth, bat the bird away. It tries again, diving headlong at my mouth. I refuse. I deny entry, stand up. It looks up at me from the forest floor, one blinking black eye as I cover my mouth with both hands. I want to remain empty. It’s the only way to stay alive.