The Secrets of a Fire King Page 14

  Footsteps, then, on the crushed shells. Gunnar passed through a small pool of light from the community center. I remembered his voice, his passion, as he talked about this place. I remembered, too, the feeling I’d had on the dive, when we all swam, isolated from each other yet so intimately connected. I was flattered to have been chosen, it was true. And I wanted to explore the possibilities with Jonathan. But as Gunnar disappeared again into the darkness, as I made up my mind to stay, it was yearning, finally, that compelled me. A yearning to know what Gunnar knew, to understand this place at its unmoving center. A yearning, too, for that brief moment of connection, as elusive and beautiful as the changing color of the sea.

  THE NEXT DAY I went to work. The village was small—only 867 people—and relatively young, so I was surprised to find the waiting room full, even at that early hour. On my first day I treated three kinds of skin rash and diagnosed two cases of giardia, several minor respiratory infections, a broken finger, one case of pinkeye, one urinary-tract infection, and a pregnancy. I did three well-baby checks and tested the eyesight and hearing of one of the retired scientists. The pharmacy was well stocked, and I was to prescribe within my own comfort levels. I’d never had such autonomy, such a feeling of accomplishment. And I liked the doctor, a no-nonsense Vietnamese woman who had trained in Poland, who invited me over for sushi and asked difficult questions about English grammar, and who could find a vein in any arm with a single try and no break in conversation.

  There were, right from the beginning, crises: a septic infection, an ectopic pregnancy, an alarming lump in one woman’s leg. A botanist in his mid-fifties came back from a jungle hike and dropped dead from a heart attack. There was nothing anyone could do.

  The dives, too, involved risks. Much of the research happened underwater, and there was always the danger of a tank failure or an accident. One evening, just as I was about to close the clinic, Phil came in. He had been diving deep that afternoon, at a hundred fifty feet, working with a team to set up motion sensors, and as he worked he’d felt himself growing detached and dreamy. A slender white shark passed by; instead of fear he’d felt a surge of joy and reached to touch it. Phil was an experienced diver and knew what was happening: a kind of nitrogen poisoning that distorted reason. He knew he should rise to the surface—getting out of the deep would restore the balance in his blood—but he didn’t. He swam on. After some time he floated over the shattered remains of a boat, where he thought he saw a human skeleton. He wasn’t sure if it was real or a hallucination.

  I was listening, making notes on his chart. When I looked up he was handing me a human bone, a femur. It was both smooth and porous, bleached deeply white.

  “Boat people,” he said, “that’s what I figured, people fleeing Vietnam in the eighties who hit bad weather and drowned. It’s not uncommon to find them. But the light was odd, you know, and I was narked. I knew I was narked, I told myself I ought to go up, but instead I kept floating by the boat. Little by little it seemed to me that there were people in it again. Alive, I mean, but underwater. I talked to them,” he added, and then stared at me, defiant.

  I put the femur on the counter. I’d heard these stories a lot over the years.

  “It’s lucky you had enough will to come back.”

  Phil nodded. “Gunnar saw me drifting off. He had to pull me by the arm, hard, because coming up was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m telling you,” he said, laughing at himself even as he spoke. “I felt New Age or something, as if I’d become one with the universe. Sentient and yet diffused. That sounds crazy, I know.”

  “The rapture of the deep,” I said, thinking not of Gunnar but of Pragna reaching to pull him into the boat. “There’s a reason divers call it that.”

  We talked some more—he wanted, mostly, it seemed, to tell his story. I gave him some Valium to see him through the next few hours. After Phil left I studied the femur, wondering about the life that had surrounded it, the dreams that had propelled it. Wondering what should be done with it now. In the end I took it to the deck off the atrium, where I leaned far out over the water and returned it to the sea.

  IN THIS WAY the days passed with the fluidity and continuity of waves. I was very happy. Even as I rose in the middle of the night to a knock on the door, even as I helped the ill or injured, I felt a sense of peace, of purpose. Once a week I traveled to the mainland village’s makeshift clinic, where I taught the young nurses how to dress wounds, give shots, and disinfect equipment. Then I came back to swim at sunset in a sea as calm as glass. In Minnesota, Jonathan and I always had a hard time coming back together at the end of each day. Often, we’d sat together in the evenings, hardly speaking, each absorbed in our separate lives. Here, what we did connected us, and when we were together we talked as never before. In the distance windsurfers moved in slow lines, like the ever-shifting points of a triangle made from light.

  I found myself thinking of Plato and his theory of ideal forms: a triangle drawn on paper, no matter how precisely, is only a crude representation of a triangle’s essence. Plato believed in a framework of perfection hidden behind the visible; I believed we had discovered that framework here. Jonathan and I were determined to see what would evolve between us. There were details we would need to attend to—our house, our things—but we rarely spoke of them.

  AT THE END of the hot season, near the advent of the monsoons, many people left the islands, either to escape the tedious weeks of rain or because they feared that rough seas and skies would make travel impossible. Pragna, now at the end of her eighth month, would go to Singapore and wait in an apartment near the hospital. Gunnar would join her near the due date. At the boat Gunnar put his hand on the curve of her stomach and I saw it again: something invisible but real passing between them, the glimpse of another country, a place they inhabited alone. I felt pierced with loss. Jonathan was standing next to me, and I reached to take his hand.

  A week later, the rains began. I woke to what I thought was thunder, rain so loud that Jonathan, lying next to me, had to shout to be heard. Laughing, we went outside and stood in the deluge, the water hitting the earth and bouncing high again, already filling the dry gutters and sliding in sheets from the roofs. By noon the island was transformed, water standing in shallow places and dripping from leaves, the flagstones of the paths small islands in the mud.

  Over the next days, mysteriously, the clinic filled up with crickets. When I came in the dusky light of early morning they were singing, and when I opened the door they jumped beneath the tables and onto counters, their narrow legs humming. I swept them out with a broom, great leaping piles of them. All day I leaned close to hear my patients, their breath against my ear. When the rains eased, momentarily, or for a few hours, we all relaxed, as if silence were a kind of space that had opened up around us. Our sheets and clothes grew damp. Mildew erupted overnight on Jonathan’s huaraches. One morning, I found toads nestled in my shoes.

  The rains were excessive, the worst they’d ever been. In meetings at the atrium, the sky and sea were indistinguishable. Just a few hundred miles away in Indonesia whole towns flooded, and a wedding party was washed away when a temple collapsed beneath a tidal wave. In the Philippines, an entire season of rice was destroyed. We left these meetings sobered, but sustained by Yukiko’s vision, imagining these powers transformed into energy, into light, by the ways we might change the world.

  Three weeks into the monsoons, the resort, emptied of its tourists for the season, began to flood. This was not supposed to happen. The work Jonathan had done on current dynamics and surface-wave prediction was supposed to have averted any major disaster on those beaches. We listened, helpless and disbelieving, to the reports the manager sent up. Jonathan couldn’t sleep. At night I’d wake to the scent of kerosene and find him at the table, poring over his charts and graphs beneath a flickering lamp.

  On the first calm day all of us boated over to view the damage. In places the beach had been totally resculpted. Two chalets had been swept away, th
e ceiling fans and Italian tile and comfortable deck chairs all carried out to sea. The main building had escaped damage, but its grounds had been flooded, and the receding water had left behind lakes of mud and debris.

  We walked amid the beauty and the ruins, picking up trash, skirting new lakes. Generators ran everywhere, fueling the electric pumps and vacuums. Jonathan was silent, his face as shattered as the landscape.

  When we reached the sunken garden behind the main building, Phil, his beard three days old and stubbled with red, stepped down off the stone fence and waded between the ornamental bushes. Fish were swimming in the grass, a strange and joyous sight that cheered us all. Laughing, Phil reached down and caught one in his bare hands, holding it up, a flash of white against the gray rain dripping from the sky, the leaves, our clothes. We were still laughing when we heard the soft crack, the rush of falling branches in the air. I stepped into the water, looking in the wrong direction, thinking the rushing sounds were coming from the beach. Then someone, shouting, pushed me so hard I staggered. My foot slipped in a low ditch and I felt my ankle turn. So slow, it all was, I struggled to keep my balance and yet, even as I fell, I saw the branch floating down, taking wires with it. I saw Phil see what was about to happen, the line writhing like a snake and then dropping into that lawn where water was not meant to be, where fish swam. Electricity traveled through the new lake like lightning, traveled through Phil, who dazzled us all for a terrible instant, sparks flying from his hair, his fingertips, like the flash of silver fish in the air. Phil, who was dead before he could even gasp or scream.

  Khemma started toward him—he had fallen facedown by the bougainvillea—but Jonathan grabbed her arm. The line was still alive in all that water.

  “Someone shut off the damned generator,” he shouted, his voice hoarse. And when no one moved, he went to do it himself, walking backward, his eyes caught on Phil. Already fish were beginning to rise up and float on the surface of the water. I stood up slowly, enveloped by the scent of burning flesh, singed hair. The generator ceased, and we all waded at once toward Phil, poor Phil. We pulled him out of the water, and I leaned close to do CPR, though his skin was blistered beneath his new beard, and I knew it was hopeless. Still, I held his face in my hands and pressed my lips against his, remembering his conversation with the dead at the bottom of the sea. They let me work for a while, and then there were hands on my shoulders, my arms, lifting me up.

  “Anna, that’s enough, Anna. Anna, look, you have to stop, you’re bleeding.”

  It was only then that I noticed my leg, the gash on my shin from where I had fallen, streaming blood.

  Jonathan tore his shirt into strips, and we wrapped my leg. His face was taut, a muscle jumping in his cheek. His eyes kept running over the ruined beach, Phil’s body. I tried to touch him, but he shrugged me off. When the rest of us left the island he refused to come, determined to see where he’d gone wrong. Besides, he said grimly, someone had to stay with the body. When the hydroplane reached the other island, Khemma helped me all the way back to the clinic. At the doorway I paused, remembering the day not long ago when Phil had come to me, excited and disoriented, full of visions.

  “What will they do with him?” I wondered.

  “I don’t know,” Khemma said. Her smooth olive skin was pale, and she was shivering, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “Find his family, probably, send him home.”

  “I was about to step into that water. Someone pushed me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That was Gunnar.” She helped me onto the examining table and brought me a light blanket. “I need to step out for a minute. Will you be all right? I have to call Yukiko right away.”

  “Go,” I said. Alone in the clinic, surrounded by the hum of crickets, I held my leg out straight and unwrapped the layers of Jonathan’s shirt. When I got to the wound, a neat dark slash against my shin, blood welled up at once. But not before I had glimpsed it, the flash of white bone beneath the flesh. Bone that had never felt the air.

  I pressed the cloth back down, applied pressure. For a long time I just sat. When Gunnar appeared in the doorway, I was weeping.

  “Let me see,” he said gently, pulling the cloth away. “It’s deep,” he acknowledged.

  I nodded, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand.

  “It’s cut to the bone. But it’s clean, fortunately. If you could get me the medical kit in the cupboard. And hold my leg while I do this, please.”

  Gunnar nodded and came back with the equipment. I filled a syringe with novocaine and took a long, deep breath before I injected the drug all around the gash. The numbness spread quickly, and after I’d cleaned the cut the blood subsided to an ooze. Still, when I put the first stitch in, catching my own flesh with the needle and then pulling the suture through, I felt a wave of nausea and was forced to stop. Gunnar reached up and pressed one palm against my forehead.

  “You don’t have to be so brave,” he said. “Lie down, Anna. All right?”

  “But I have to have stitches.”

  “I can sew,” he replied. “My grandmother believed it was an essential skill for all human beings, male or female.”

  “Well, that’s great,” I said. “I don’t suppose you practiced on human beings?”

  Gunnar, wisely, ignored me. “My grandmother is still living,” he said. I felt his fingers, and the pressure of the stitches going in. “She will be a hundred years old next year.”

  He told me stories of his country as he worked, the long tongues of glaciers reaching down valleys, the fertile rivers and charming cities. The interior of the island so rugged that American astronauts had used it to practice moon landings. Swimming pools filled by geothermal springs, where the snow melted in the rising steam as people swam. Every few months he went back to teach, and to collect data from the Icelandic seas.

  “All right,” he said, putting one hand on my shoulder. “Sit up.”

  The stitches were ugly, rough and uneven, but they were tight and secure. I dressed the wound and stood, testing my weight on my foot.

  “Oh,” I said, looking up at the pain, tears in my eyes. I was thinking of Jonathan, the lines in his face, but what I said was “Poor Phil.”

  Gunnar nodded, studying me.

  “Can you walk, Anna?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

  He studied me a moment longer, deciding.

  “Good,” he said. “Follow me.”

  We walked down an unfamiliar path and arrived at a black sand beach. The sea was rough, but the setting sun had broken from the clouds and everything was vibrant in the sudden light. There was a shallow cave in the cliff, stairs opening into a passage lit like the aisle of an airplane. Gunnar saw me limping and put his arm around my waist, helping me down the steps.

  We emerged into a room underwater. It was built like a greenhouse, with walls of glass. But in the same shape, I saw right away, as the swelling walls of the atrium. We were in the deep water before the drop-off, so that the dome—a pleasure dome, I thought, remembering some long-ago poem—stood as if on the edge of a cliff, fields of coral, the spiny dark sea urchins all around us, and then on the far side of the drop-off, a sudden darkness, the edge of an abyss. Light fell in nets through the water and shimmered across the floor, across my skin, wavered on Gunnar’s face as he turned to me. His eyes were the same blue as the water.

  I went to the glass and pressed my hands against it, my face. My breath gathered and disappeared. A school of parrot fish swam by, an inch, no more, away.

  “We are about thirty feet below the surface,” Gunnar said. “The site was very carefully chosen. No coral was destroyed.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” I whispered. I felt as if I might cry, I wanted so to feel those fish brush against my hand.

  Even as we spoke the light had begun to fade, the sun setting far above.

  “It is a research station,” Gunnar said, gesturing toward the drop-off. “We take AUVs out of an antechamber to this room and travel half a m
ile down to the site. I am talking about a series of hydrothermal vents on the floor of the deep ocean. Near them, we have discovered biological communities—novel, strange communities found nowhere else. And from these communities we are learning extraordinary things about the evolution of life. Unusual symbiosis we had never imagined possible. As a scientist, you must always ask yourself the same question, again and again: Why this form and not another? Why this path and not any other?”

  In this short time the water around us had grown dark, and fish had begun to emerge, giving off their own pale light. Flashlight fish, shimmering blue-green, and bioluminescent plankton glittering in their wake. Gunnar was no more than a shadow beside me, but his voice, too, was lit with excitement.

  “It is not fixed, is what I am saying, Anna. The evolution of life. In these communities we are not studying fossils or shells or the dead artifacts of creation. We are watching life evolve, before our very eyes. You see these fish, giving off their own light? This phenomenon happens very rarely in the world. In freshwater, not at all. In fireflies, yes, and in some worms, but on earth, almost never. Yet in the deep ocean ninety percent of all animals are luminescent. The chemical process has evolved independently in a dozen different paths. In that same way, these new communities are seeking a different form from anything that now exists. Discovering their potential is the center of our mission here.”

  “And the coral reefs?” I asked. “Jonathan’s work on currents, on waves?”

  “Also important,” Gunnar said. “But not the center. Anna, do you understand? We are what we are, you and I. Our evolution has followed a particular path to bring us to this moment and no other. But imagine if another path had been taken, long ago. Imagine if a new evolution naturally occurred, so that an organism such as plankton, say, suddenly contained the chemical properties of fuel. Or of a perfect protein. Not something engineered by humans. Something natural, driven by evolutionary necessity. Imagine if these resources were plentiful and cheap, what this would mean.”