The Secrets of a Fire King Page 15

  On the surface far above, plankton glittered like a sweeping of stars. I felt a surge of excitement, power, the thrill of possibility.

  “You would change the world,” I said, softly. I thought of the streams of cars back home, exhaust hiding the sun, starving children, struck by drought. “You would save it.”

  “Yes,” Gunnar said. “I would. I will. Perhaps it will take decades, but we will do this thing. Without Yukiko, of course, this would not be possible. Pragna knows, a few others here. But I would ask you not to speak of this.”

  “Another test?”

  “No,” Gunnar said. Medusa jellyfish hovered nearby, their light a translucent green. “This is me, trusting you to see what I am seeing. Sometimes I come here simply for the beauty. To remind myself of what is at the center. Of the mystery.”

  “You’re a scientist,” I said, trying to imagine this same passion in Jonathan’s voice when he talked about boundary-layer data. “I didn’t think scientists believed in mystery.”

  Gunnar laughed. “If there were no mystery, Anna, there would be no science.”

  I loved his voice, the way he spoke my name, as if there were waves running through it. We were quiet as we left, walking back through the passage and up the dark stairs. I had been given a gift, I knew this, a gift meant to ease my sorrow. And it had. I never spoke of that place to anyone, and yet I could not stop thinking of it. A rush of the surf and I might close my eyes, imagining the strange light of this other world, hidden beneath the surface of the usual. And sometimes, leaving Jonathan in his restless sleep, I returned to that silent room. I pressed my hands against the glass, plankton scattered high above like stars, fish moving past in their slow orbits, like planets, like strange moons.

  PEOPLE BELIEVED it was the shock of watching Phil’s death that had unsettled me, but I knew the source of my restlessness was more complex. Even as the rains abated and our things dried out and people began to return to the islands, I remained alive with secrets, changed by what I’d seen, and the act of not running into Gunnar became as deliberate as running into him would have been. Jonathan was distracted by his failures, and his small habits got on my nerves. The rituals of my life and work, once so satisfying, seemed increasingly empty. More than once I stopped in the center of the clinic, halfway across the room to fetch something I could not remember. More than once I went to the cliff edge and stood gazing out at the water, that high wind in my hair, and the abyss of air just a step away.

  “This happens to everyone,” Jonathan said one morning, handing me a cup of coffee, but I knew it had not happened to him, not in this way, not for these reasons. “Why don’t you take a vacation, Anna? It’s a bad time for me right now, anyway.”

  And so I traveled by boat to the mainland, where I boarded a prop plane and then one jet and then another, all the way back to Minneapolis. I had been gone five months, and I felt like a ghost, returning to a home I’d never inhabit again.

  In the city, too, I felt this. Litter swirled, and sirens screamed through the streets. The papers were full of things I’d forgotten: murders and racial tension, car accidents and congestion. NPR did a story on a food shortage developing in Nigeria and the effects of drilling for oil in the frozen arctic sea, and I found myself sitting on the edge of my chair, gripping my coffee cup so hard my knuckles turned white. In this world, I was helpless. I fell asleep at all hours of the day, and dreamed of the waves, rushing one against the other on the shore. I dreamed of falling through the water, or of standing beneath it, my hand held flat against the blueness of that glass.

  I had planned to stay for several weeks, but when Jonathan e-mailed that Yukiko Santiago was planning to visit the islands, I changed my mind. It took just two days to clean out our lives in Minneapolis. I didn’t ask Jonathan about any of it—I just wanted it done. A few old pieces of furniture from his family I put into storage, but almost everything else I gave away. When the plane lifted off, I felt, for the first time in my life, completely free.

  When I got back, patients were lined up in the waiting room. I was so busy, and so glad to be back, that for several weeks I hardly thought of Gunnar. I glimpsed him now and then, standing on the boat or walking along the beach. Sometimes he waved across the distance, and I waved back. Pragna had returned from Singapore with the baby, and I saw them too, sitting on the veranda of their chalet or strolling in the park at dawn or dusk. It was a girl, named Analia. After no one, they said, a name they’d invented, a name without the weight of history. I held her once, so small and warm, when Pragna came in for a well-baby check, and sometimes I saw her in the nursery, when Pragna stopped in after work to use the treadmill or the pool. Pragna seemed restless to me, as changed as I felt. One night, walking home late, I saw Gunnar pacing their porch with Analia in his arms. In the distance, behind the sound of the waves, I heard Pragna, faintly weeping.

  The days slid by, one into another. The paths hummed with gardeners, painters, carpenters. Jonathan spent long days, and sometimes nights as well, on the other island, overseeing the installation of new drainage and wave-forecasting systems. He took the damage, and Phil’s death, personally, and worried that he might have made equally catastrophic errors in his greater research. Late at night, when he slipped into bed, I’d touch his shoulder and he wouldn’t respond. Jonathan, I’d say, are you all right? And he’d sigh and say he was tired, too tired to talk. Often, when I woke in the morning, he was already gone.

  Yukiko Santiago arrived on a brilliantly clear day. Diminutive, almost frail, with her hair swept into a severe bun, she wore a blue suit, black high heels, and glasses too large for her face. She walked among us in the park, Gunnar at her side, pausing to greet old friends. When she reached me she held my hand for a moment and said she was glad I had stayed. I was so pleased I could hardly speak. For several days I glimpsed her traveling along paths in a golf cart. I imagined her in secret meetings, or standing in that underwater room.

  I did not expect to talk with her again, but on her final day she came to the mainland to observe my clinic. I was nervous during the hydroplane ride, the wind in our hair and salt spray staining her glasses. But in the clinic she was warm, pragmatic, easy to approach. She prepared the plaster for a cast and held the boy’s arm as I applied it. She noted vitals, took throat cultures, and talked through an interpreter to the nursing students. At the end of the day, we sat on the edge of the dock with our legs dangling. Below, the waves moved over the white sand.

  “Ganbatte, Anna,” Yukiko said. I felt myself flush with pleasure. “Very well done, indeed.” She looked at me directly, taking me in. “Anna,” she said, “tell me honestly: is there anything you need?”

  I thought she meant the clinic and started to tell her about which supplies were running low, but she interrupted me with a wave of one hand.

  “Not that,” she said. “You. Are you happy here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am.” But to my own surprise I started talking about Jonathan and his worries, the way he couldn’t sleep at night, the growing gulf between us.

  Yukiko nodded, staring out over the clear water to where the hydroplane was now visible, a dot on the horizon.

  “His error cost a great deal of money,” she acknowledged. “Still, I am not so concerned with the loss itself, which may open up a new path, a better path. That is always the advantage of failure. But Jonathan’s reaction does concern me. He has not made much progress on the new plans. He’s become too afraid to be bold.”

  “He loves this place,” I said, dismayed, for I understood her implication, and the irony. Jonathan had brought me here; now he might have to leave.

  The wind swept at Yukiko’s hair. She took off her glasses and polished them on the hem of her shirt. “I know,” she said. “It would be a loss if he left. But the community will survive. It is only Gunnar, finally, we could not spare. His vision is essential to us all.”

  I nodded, feeling helpless as I remembered his voice in the underwater room, the sound of Pra
gna weeping.

  When I got back to the chalet Jonathan was sitting at the table, peeling a mango. We’d hardly touched in weeks, but now I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “I spoke with Yukiko,” I told him.

  Jonathan put the knife on his plate and stood up. He walked over to the window, and when he spoke his voice was bitter. “Great,” he said. “That’s just terrific.”

  And suddenly, out of worry and frustration and a sense of impending loss, a fierce anger rose up in me. I remembered Jonathan sitting beside me in the atrium on that first day, watching me apprehend all that had been hidden. I remembered him putting the delicate shell into my hand saying, This, too, is a test. How disoriented I’d felt, as if the world were no longer a steady place, but something that swam and glittered and changed in every instant.

  “I know how you feel,” I said, trying to stay calm.

  “You can’t possibly,” he snapped, and something in me broke loose.

  “You’re right,” I said, preparing to be cruel and taking pleasure in it, too. “I’ll never know what you’re going through. After all, I passed the test.”

  I slammed the door and walked to the atrium, where a group was already drinking on the balcony. Gunnar was there, on his second beer, and I found myself watching him, remembering our time below the water, what Yukiko had said. There was a bright sheen of red on the water, phosphorescent algae that traced the waves. Someone suggested a night dive. I was a little drunk already, and I ran to collect the waterproof flashlights and our gear, then joined the others on the beach, where Pragna and Gunnar were arguing. Pragna was holding Analia, her voice rising above the waves.

  “Gunnar,” she said. “This is madness.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” he insisted, and I remembered the play of skeletal light on his skin as we stood together in the silent dome, his fingers on my leg as he made his clumsy sutures. The others had already gone as he stepped into the waves, and when Pragna called to him again he did not stop. After a moment I followed him, swimming to the beam of light he held. The waves crashed hard against the rocks and the currents pulled at us. I touched his arm.

  “It’s Anna,” I said.

  “Anna.”

  “Gunnar!” Pragna’s voice came to us, broken by the waves, edged with anguish. “Gunnar! Please, Gunnar. You are frightening me. Come back this instant! Gunnar! Do you hear me?”

  “Ah, she is ruining it all,” he said, and there was anguish in his voice, too. “She wants to leave. She wants us all to leave.”

  “No,” I said, trying to imagine staying here without him. “No, don’t, Gunnar. You can’t.”

  Our hands brushed one another in the water and he reached for me. I couldn’t seem to help myself. I ran my hand along Gunnar’s leg. He did not speak, but faced me as he had on that other day, that last and first day, when we passed the regulator back and forth and each one, each time, saved the other’s life.

  We swam, breaking a path through the phosphorescence, past the rocks to the black sand beach, where we shed our gear, our suits. Sand gave way beneath our feet and then our bodies were on that sand, half in the sea and half on land, and with every movement the water eased from beneath my back and his. Faint light from the plankton trailed across his skin and mine, glowing where we touched each other—the line of his jaw, the curve of my shoulder, our lips. For a long time after we lay there, touching length to length, fading slowly back to darkness. I knew, of course, that the future might evolve in a thousand different ways, but in those moments I believed Gunnar would stay. I believed he would stay with me.

  When he sat up, without speaking I knew what it meant. Freedom first, he’d said one night, long ago. His lips were on mine again; his hands touched my face, leaving coolness in their wake this time. Anna, he said. You are so beautiful. And I—I am so sorry. Then I heard the splashing, glimpsed the momentary break in the phosphorescence—he was gone.

  I stayed where I was for a long time. I’d lost the flashlight. Also, my suit. Even my hands were invisible in that darkness. I felt my way to the edge of the path and began to climb, slowly, gradually, through dense foliage, feeling the air change, faintly, as the path rose. When I reached the ridge, the atrium was visible, swelling from the edge of the cliff and glowing softly.

  I stopped, suddenly afraid. Loss gaped like an abyss. For I understood that I would leave this place, and that my leaving had been seeded long ago, when I handed Gunnar my regulator, when the live wire had fallen, twisting, to the lawn where fish swam, when Pragna had called out, her voice laced with anguish.

  When Gunnar, yes, had turned to me.

  I gazed out into the darkness of sea and sky, thinking of that hidden room, the secret locus of all yearning. A faint wind moved through my hair. I thought of Phil, conversing with the dead, and then of Gunnar, swimming. I imagined the fields of sea urchins unfolding beneath him, their perfect, hidden bones curved to hold the light, their thorns repelling, interweaving. So beautiful they were, so strange. Echinodermata: Echinoidea, with a thousand eyes, all blind.

  The Secrets of a Fire King

  “JASPER,” SHE WHISPERED, HER SHADOW MOONCAST AGAINST THE tent wall. Night smell of damp canvas and a dark wind off the river. My mouth watered, I imagined her lips as they rounded out my name. She whispered “Jasper!” And I told her, “I am coming.” I said, “Wait,” struggling into my clothes. “I am coming.” I crawled right over Ogleby the snake man, who was snoring with his mouth wide open, his big feet blocking the door flap. She moved beside me, beyond the canvas wall, yet with me, just inches away. Then her shadow drew up suddenly and fell into the greater darkness. By the time I got outside, she was gone.

  I stood there, searching, tents and wagons an eerie white in the moonlight. We were camped in the fairgrounds by the river. I listened past Ogleby’s great snores and the nearby rustle of the animals and the tin pans of the mess wagon tapping in the breeze. I listened hard, to the susurration of the water rising up, to the air moving lightly through the trees. It was quiet but for the wind and thus, when the preacher spoke, his voice breaking the silence like a whip, I jumped a mile.

  He said, “You are treading near fire, Jasper. You had better beware.”

  My fists clenched at his words, for I knew my young and willing girl was gone, my hours of sweet talk wasted. “The righteous need no candle,” he went on, mocking my night blindness, “neither light of the sun.”

  “Leave me alone,” I demanded, turning toward his voice. “Do you hear?”

  “Oh, I hear you,” he said, his voice so soft I had to strain to listen. “But the great question is, do you hear? Jasper? Do you hear what the spirit sayeth?”

  He shifted, stepping from the shadows. Moonlight streamed down his pale skin, caught on his ring, heavy gold, stones inset like a fireburst, which he waved before the sinners in each new town like a tiny piece of heaven, hard and shiny, of value beyond reckoning, nearly impossible to attain. The next day I might even see my sweet-talk girl hovering beside him, bedazzled and saved and lost to me forever. I stood poised, waiting. I would not stagger after him like a fool, but like a fool I was furious enough to fire the argument that had been smoldering between us all these years.

  “You saved me once already,” I reminded him. “And once was too much for any lifetime.”

  “Blasphemer,” he said, his voice a whisper now, floating to me amid the tree sounds, the water murmurings. “You will burn in a lake of fire.”

  I knew he was gone. But of course, so was she. I walked to the edge of the river, leaving the cluster of tents behind me, willing her to appear, firm and supple, draped with light. The wind rustled in the leaves, tapped the hanging pans, but he had scared her good, and despite my longing she did not come again.

  THEY CALLED HIM FATHER the next morning when they gathered at the river. Father, will you save me? He stood among them, his white robes catching the wind, bits of paper and refuse from the campground skittering through the long grass and settling in
the flowing water. I stood a safe distance away—on higher ground, in a copse of trees—as he called the chosen forth, one by one, and had them kneel together at the river’s edge. An elderly woman in her threadbare best, a bearded man whose wrists hung out below his coat sleeves. A slender girl, with eyes as blue and pale as the sky at the horizon, who was pulled from the crowd by her thick-waisted mother. Four souls, only, yet the preacher acted as if he’d gathered fifty, mayors and businessmen among them. He waded in, his robes catching the current, the elderly woman’s hand in his. There was shock on her face as the cold water climbed her clothes, and she had hardly taken her hat off when he dunked her under. She came up gasping, dazed, her white hair pulled loose, stringy down her back.

  The bearded man was next—he rose up with a whoop and holler—and then the mother, all shades of gray, grasping both of the preacher’s hands and stepping gingerly, rock to rock. The girl was last. The river eddied around her bluish skirts, climbed darkly to her waist, spread like a stain up the bodice of her dress. She was slender, but strong and supple as a sapling, and she held her hands high, open palmed, refusing help as she waded in waist deep. She was reluctant, that was clear, and when the preacher reached for her she jerked away from him so hard she slipped. Slowly then, like a leaf falling, she disappeared beneath the water. Right away the preacher dove. His hands flashed and he came up gasping twice, the river streaming from his hair, his robes. The world hung suspended, silent, as the minutes passed, and the crowd rose to its feet, stirring and straining like some great animal, certain that the girl was lost. But when the preacher rose up a final time he had a skirt snagged in his fingers. The girl was unconscious, maybe dead, her white arms limp against his back as they rose out of the water.