The Secrets of a Fire King Page 13

  Water moved against my naked lips; the taste of salt, the taste of panic. It seeped into me, became a slow welling, as Gunnar breathed and breathed, as my own lungs grew taut. Jonathan and Phil were still dozens of yards away and did not notice what was happening. My lungs began to burn. I touched Gunnar’s arm. He did not respond. I grabbed him harder. He opened his eyes, calmer now, and put one hand on my shoulder. He passed me the regulator, warm in my mouth from his lips.

  Together, then, with many pauses, we kicked our way toward the surface. A deep breath, a passing of the regulator, acts as intimate and essential and full of question as a kiss. I breathed, and then Gunnar did. It was a kind of dance, urgent and calm, full of fluid grace. One creature, with one purpose: the surface of the water far above, that invisible border where the water opened to the sky. It seemed to take forever, but at last we broke through, flinging our heads back, releasing each other. I drank in the air.

  “Anna!” Gunnar shouted, gasping. He ripped off his mask, sunlight in his dark blond hair. “Anna, you saved my life, you did.”

  THAT NIGHT, in the darkness of our chalet, my bags already packed, I lay next to Jonathan. We had eaten grilled fish with the rest of the group and had drunk a lot of beer in celebration and farewell, watching the sunset flare the world pink and gold. The manager had walked down the beach setting coconuts on fire, leaving them to blaze like skulls against the sand. Now it was late, the fires had died, and we were alone with the moonlight and the waves, but even though I was leaving in the morning with nothing settled, what Jonathan was talking about was the dive.

  “I was right behind you,” he said. “I know it must have been terrifying, but it was also beautiful to watch, Anna. You were splendid.”

  I shifted, turning to lie on my side. What went unspoken between us had always seemed like its own sea, full of mysterious shifts and currents. Jonathan’s dark hair brushed my arm. He placed one hand lightly on my hip. I wondered when he was coming home to Minneapolis. When or if.

  “I didn’t want to be splendid,” I told him. “It was awful to be without air. I was afraid every time that he wouldn’t give it back.”

  Jonathan looked at me, his expression so intent, so focused, a sort of intimacy he didn’t often allow. “Still, you did it,” he said. “You didn’t miss a beat.”

  I remembered the shell then, its slow, tumbling fall through the dark blue water. And I thought of Pragna, how she had stood up in the boat when we broke through the surface, leaning to help Gunnar in, her arms slender and muscled, his hands running down the swell of her belly, his cheek sliding down to rest there. An intimate moment, so passionate, so spontaneous; I’d paused in the water, watching, glad to be alive, yet struck with yearning.

  “I’m a little bit in love with those two,” Jonathan observed, as if he’d read my mind. We often had the same thoughts at the same time, a fact that had comforted me when Jonathan was gone or distant, distracted by his work. That night, though, for reasons I couldn’t name, his comment made me restless and annoyed. I went to the dressing table and sat down.

  “In love?” I asked, turning on a lamp and reaching for a comb. “What are you telling me? Are you in love with Pragna?”

  “No.” Jonathan sounded surprised. “With what they have between them.”

  He came and stood behind me then. He took the comb from my hand. We studied ourselves in the mirror, blond and dark, blue eyes and brown, the perfect twinning of opposites. What they have, I thought. And what we don’t.

  “You’re not coming back,” I said, meeting his gaze in the glass.

  He shook his head, slowly. Then he surprised me again. He leaned down and kissed my neck, just at the point where my hair brushed the skin.

  “You don’t have to go tomorrow,” he said, kneeling beside me, resting his chin on my shoulder. “You don’t have to go at all.”

  “Not go?” I echoed, puzzled.

  “Anna,” he said. “There’s something I want you to see.”

  “A secret?” I asked. The ceiling fan clicked. Jonathan put the comb down. Gently, he massaged the base of my neck, my shoulders.

  “Yes,” he said, his hands moving up then, through my hair. “A secret, yes.”

  AT DAWN, rather than leaving, Jonathan took me out in a small boat, pulling away from the resort into the pale white mergence of the sea and sky. The sun rose, becoming oppressive as we traveled through the chain of islands. At last Jonathan pulled the boat up to a narrow dock. Here the beach, crushed white coral, was sharp against our feet. A few yards into the trees we came to a single bright yellow car of a funicular railway.

  I looked at Jonathan, who simply smiled. “You’ll see,” he said, fastening the door behind us. “Just wait and see.”

  The car lurched and we climbed high up the face of the cliff, the rock raw and rough behind us, the beach below sliding beneath the clear smooth water. I don’t know what I expected to be shown—a fabulous view, a virgin jungle. But when the car came to a stop I stepped out into a clearing, lush with tropical foliage, coconuts and palms and swaying mango trees. A group of children played with a rattan ball on the grass at the far end, where a wide gate, like those outside Japanese temples, opened onto a village street. We walked on a path of finely crushed shells that caught the light and gleamed. Hundreds of people of every race, every age, were carrying baskets or babies, ringing the bells of their bicycles, hoisting packs with rice or bread on their backs, holding hands, pausing to talk beneath the shady casuarina trees. We passed one simple building after another, made of teak or covered with clapboard painted in pastel blue, yellow, peach, or mint green. Hibiscus and bougainvillea flamed by the doorways and the white fences. These buildings housed restaurants, coffee shops, stalls for fruit and vegetables. People sat at tables, drinking tea, cats weaving around their ankles. We passed a community center and a sign for the health clinic. After that the path narrowed and the buildings became small chalets, scattered amid the trees and overlooking the ocean.

  Jonathan was known; people kept stopping him to talk. Don’t go, he’d said, and I’d imagined some kind of nomadic life, just us, someplace where we might become slightly different, better people. I kept glancing at him, his long tanned arms and the familiar line of his jaw, trying to understand who he was. Just beyond the community center we turned down another path. Tropical flowers brushed my arms. There was a fragrance, dense and heavy as the heat.

  “Here,” Jonathan said as we came to a teak building. He held the door open for me, and I stepped into an astonishing room.

  It was circular, half of it set into the cliff, half cantilevered out over the ocean and framed by high, curving walls of glass, filled with light. Filled, I saw as I drew closer, with a view of the sea. The room was vast, a full three stories high. People lounged on sofas, read newspapers, chatted by a fountain in the center. Gunnar was there, and Pragna too, sitting at a small table, empty cups before them. They smiled and waved. Jonathan and I crossed the room and sat on a sofa by the glass wall. A hundred feet below the waves slammed in, seething into a white spray flung skyward.

  Nets of light, reflected in random and chaotic patterns from the waves, played over people as, one by one, they came to join us.

  “Where are we?” I asked Jonathan.

  I spoke softly, yet my voice filled the room. Everyone laughed. Pragna sat on the sofa opposite.

  “This is the atrium, Anna. We’ll explain.”

  She began to talk then, and others broke in, telling me the story. Ten years ago this chain of twelve islands had been purchased by a consortium of investors. They planned a development of high-rise hotels, the jungled hills denuded and flattened for airstrips, a restaurant built over the fragile coral reefs we had explored all week. I knew just what this meant and how bad it could be: Jonathan and I had spent a week on the southern coast of Thailand, where the beaches were littered with tourists and trash, where raw sewage poured into the sea and chunks of dead coral, loosened by anchors, washed up on shore.
The villagers, fishermen for untold generations, had taken jobs waiting tables, their black shoes slipping against the sand. Nights were neon; young girls, lured from poor villages, flickered on the corners until dawn, and when the sun rose it was reddened by the haze, pollution from logging fires raging in Borneo. It was more hell than paradise, but it was profitable in the short term. The developers here had envisioned the same thing. The plans had been drawn: bulldozers had been lined up on the mainland like orange and yellow insects, set to invade.

  Then Yukiko Santiago intervened.

  Yukiko Santiago. I had never heard of her, but the people in that room spoke of her with something close to reverence. She was the daughter of a Japanese samurai family, whose grandfather had supported the imperial army and committed seppuku, whose father had rebuilt the family fortunes in the wake of the Second World War. Yukiko, as a child, had witnessed both the horrific machine of the state and the devastation of war. Half of her mother’s family had died in Hiroshima. She had grown up to marry a wealthy Peruvian businessman, and when he was killed in a plane crash she had taken his considerable wealth, coupled with her own inheritance, and set about doing philanthropy. Reclusive, generous, she had a simple philosophy: she had seen the worst that human beings might do, and she wanted now to see the best. She had flown in to buy these islands, offering the investors cash settlements greater than the returns they would have seen for twenty years. Then she had turned the development plans inside out: the high-end ecotourist resort where we had stayed would preserve the coral reefs and island jungles, all the while funding her real interest, a global coalition of research stations known collectively as the Sea Earth Institute—SEArth.

  “All right,” I interrupted. “But there’s a village out there. A town. Schools and a community center. Restaurants.”

  “Yes. We are a community.” The woman who spoke was thin and strong, a sarong skirt tied at her waist. Her name was Khemma. A Cambodian, like many here she had been a refugee, a survivor of war or other atrocities. She was now the community librarian. “In the beginning this place was simply for research. The growth happened very gradually, very organically, as researchers brought their families. There has never been any plan imposed. But once it was clear what was happening, Yukiko Santiago appointed a board to assess and guide the evolution of the community. To provide what came to be needed. To see, in essence, where this other, new experiment would lead.”

  “Yes,” Gunnar said. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. I remembered his fingers on my shoulder. “It is Aristotle’s idea of entelechy, applied not to biology but to our human community. Entelechy—it is the science of the possible, of unlocking what is otherwise merely potential. As we see it, Anna, the ideal is like a vessel with which a community may select those possibilities suitable to its own nature—those which promise to further human development. We do not impose here. We discover.”

  I turned to Jonathan. That sensation I’d had on the path, that this man I’d known was suddenly strange to me, returned. I watched the way he spoke, his fingertips tapping on his bare knee. I couldn’t believe we’d ever stood side by side at a counter, dicing vegetables, or that these same hands had reached for me last night.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked, remembering the long Minnesota nights, his infrequent e-mails from what he said were Internet cafés.

  He nodded, acknowledging his lies. “Ever since I left. Remember that trip, that conference, a year or so ago? I met Pragna there. Phil and Khemma, too. They invited me to visit. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you, Anna. I couldn’t. But from the beginning I wanted you to come. And after yesterday,” he added, “you’re more than welcomed.”

  Everyone smiled. Understanding flashed through me, sudden and harsh.

  “It was a test?” I said, too shocked to be angry right away. “That emergency was engineered?”

  “My air was gone,” Gunnar told me. “But the event was planned, yes.”

  I remembered my guilt at forgetting him. My fear and panic when I saw his air was gone, what it had cost me to trust him. And all the time they had known, they had been watching me.

  When Jonathan touched my arm, I pulled away. I couldn’t speak, but my feelings must have been working on my face.

  “Is Yukiko on the line yet?” Khemma asked Phil, softly. “Can you get her? Because she will explain it best,” she added, turning to me. “Of course you are angry, Anna. We would not expect otherwise. We have all been through this, and we have all been angry too.” She flashed a slow smile. “You might even say that getting past the anger is the most real test.”

  And then Yukiko was there, flashing up on a screen against the rock-faced interior wall, a diminutive woman in a pale blue dress, her dark hair falling loose and streaked with gray.

  “Hello, Anna,” she said, and I was startled to be addressed so warmly and directly. She smiled, and her smile was kind. “You were tested, yes. Perhaps that was not very fair. But since you are in love with a scientist, I hope you will understand. This is not simply a community here, and it is not only about the coral reefs. We are engaged in a greater research, which involves charting currents and wave systems. We wish, ultimately, to harness the latent power of these forces. To find an alternative form of energy. It’s important work, and many here are political refugees, whose lives could be endangered if their whereabouts were known. So we must be careful. We recognize our interconnectedness, and our own fragility. Not everyone suits. And not for everyone would this be a good place.”

  A skeletal light played over the array of faces, and the room filled with the muted crash of waves.

  “You can talk normally,” Pragna said. “She’ll hear you.”

  I was still stunned, but at Pragna’s voice, anger shattered through me. She had reached for Gunnar as if he were returning from the dead.

  “Everyone in that boat lied to me,” I said, and then I turned to Jonathan. “Including you. Especially you.”

  “Jonathan was your very strong supporter, Anna,” Yukiko said. “He went through a similar experience on his arrival. He did not wish you to go through it also. Yet we had no choice.”

  “Anna,” Gunnar said. “We were taking a risk, also. We did not want to lose Jonathan.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to take it all in, what had happened, what was happening.

  “Take some time, Anna,” Yukiko said, and I opened my eyes to see her smiling at me, one hand lifting, as if she might reach through the air and touch me. And I wanted that suddenly, to be a part of this, to please them, and yet—and yet—so much had happened so quickly. “Take your time,” she repeated, and then her image disappeared.

  “Here,” Jonathan said after a few minutes of silence. “In case you think I wasn’t paying any attention.”

  He handed me the shell I’d lost, or one just like it. Aristotle’s lantern, round, slightly flattened, the surface rough, pierced with tiny holes.

  When he spoke again Jonathan’s voice had an urgency I recognized. This, I knew, was a moment he’d been imagining for weeks.

  “Anna, the word ‘test’ comes from the Latin testa, meaning shell. In the Middle Ages, a test also was a kind of vessel, in which experiments were done. You just heard Gunnar say that the ideal is a kind of vessel, too. He’s right. In some sense, every day here is an experiment. Every day, a test.”

  I turned the shell, so delicate, nearly weightless. I understood that he was offering me, in his oblique way, in the only language he could use, another way of seeing what had happened. And in that moment I saw how the curve of the glass wall swelling over the sea mirrored exactly the shape of the shell in my hand. I held it up on my palm, looking from shell to wall and back again.

  “Yes,” Gunnar said. “Good eye, Anna.”

  “But not good enough,” I answered.

  He looked up, sharply, at the bitter edge in my voice. Then he cleared his throat and went on.

  “As you know, Aris
totle classified the animals. He named this shell. You can see how the shape is like a lantern, how the light could flow out of the pattern of tiny holes. These urchins are indigenous, and beautiful, and so we took their name for our community. But Aristotle is important to us for another reason. He was the first to challenge Plato’s ideal state. Plato’s utopia was many good things, but it was also static. Plato did not allow for growth or change or self-transformation, and in some sense this flaw—of fixation—led very naturally to the dystopias we have all seen, and which many of us have experienced and have fled.”

  “Is that another test for admission?” I asked, glancing around the room. “Surviving oppression?”

  Gunnar, unamused, shook his head.

  “It is not. But people with such histories tend to understand our purpose. You see, while Aristotle’s view, too, was flawed, for him the community was alive. He believed it could grow and change, like every living organism. For Aristotle, politics was the science of the possible. That is what we believe. And this belief sustains us.”

  I cupped the shell and remembered Gunnar’s eyes, his finger making that frantic slash across his throat, the bubbles flowering from his lips.

  “I risked my life,” I said, still angry.

  “Yes,” Pragna said. “You risked your life for a man you hardly knew. Precisely.”

  That night, as Jonathan slept, I lay awake and listened to the pounding of the surf. If I stayed, as they had asked me to, I would become the community health-care specialist. There was a doctor who came three times a month whom I would assist, and in her absence I would oversee the clinic. And once a week I’d go to the mainland, to a community there, and work training nurses and midwives, treating patients, giving vaccines.

  I dressed and walked to the park, where I sat on a bench above the vast ocean. The stars were vivid, near, and the darkness was filled with sounds I didn’t recognize: birds and insects and the rustling of unseen animals. I’d never felt so unsettled, so unsure of what to do, the world unmoored, swimming. I wondered how my life would be if I stayed, what I’d gain and what I’d sacrifice forever.