The Jump

The Jump

At this particular hour, or perhaps this peculiar hour, Seattle crystallized the way overboiled maple syrup stuck to the edges of the pot on his boyhood farm in Vermont, sugary and stubborn. It was the fog really- in late March it presented such a thorough assault on one’s sense of direction, wrapping everything in its weightless expectation. He was going to be late. He didn’t care. Truthfully, he hoped to be fired, so much nobler and satisfying a fate than the half-assed corporate integrity he’d be subjected to in the form or fleeting, smug admonishment from friends and enemies alike. His boss was tragic- that was the word really. Any meanness or short-sighted adherence to the mindless company rules was excused in light of this. He was one of those nebulously block-headed, strong-shouldered types from some graying Midwestern suburb who’d moved here for the ‘quality of life.’ His work consumed most of this ‘quality’ though, so it seemed that the added value was marginal. He was so earnest, so hopeful when he groveled before the soulless, fleshy board members in meetings on the 70^th floor, his comically deflated biceps of former football glory quivering slightly with their approval. But, being soulless, they shot him down without the slightest remorse- their brand of icy capitalism allowed now room for second guesses.

Oliver strode swiftly up the imposing stone steps in front of the Columbia Tower, the giant revolving doors before him the first step towards indoctrination into feeling important and thus no longer having to really feel, he thought. This steel and glass heart of man’s ego was beautiful in a way, it was such an affront to the mossy gray Seattle skyline that every citizen of the city seemed to share some hard, polarized opinion on it. The ride alone up to the 63^rd floor was unusually silent, devoid of the hysterical yelps and incongruities he felt were necessary on most days to deflate his inner mania so the workday could proceed as it was supposed to. When he was exhumed from the sleek metal tomb and thrust into harshly fluorescent mediocrity 630-odd feet above the Pacific, his boss was not pleased. “Oliver, look- I really like you, man. You’re a great team player. But this can’t keep happening.” Oliver wanted to yawn, to run, to scream out into the awful rows of white-collar sweatshop partitions, but instead he did none of these things and looked Joe squarely in the eyes for the first time in a long while.

At first he nodded gravely, the way Joe’s sons probably did when he gave them some sage bit of coaching at the pewee football league game, wanting to please their father but also firmly part of the cult of middling America. Oliver hated all of it right now, himself most of all. The passive-aggressive mindlessness, the way ‘buddy’ sounded so much like ‘fuck you’, only spoken in more equivocal terms. When you are deprived of the space to make yourself whole, he thought, to serve your own needs with equal vigor as you carry out someone else’s plans for your life, then this is what happens. “Joe, I’m really sorr-“ he starts to say, but forcefully, rigidly cuts himself off. Sorry was such a limp abomination. “I don’t know if I can do this”, he continues with unsteady conviction. “I’m just not cut out for this type of work.” “Nobody is, Oliver. That’s why you have to learn.” Such forthright exposure of imperfection was rare for Joe. Oliver wondered if his depression med’s weren’t working again. There was a pregnant pause, weakened slightly by the fabulously gray sheets of drizzle that cascaded down endless windows towards Interstate-5 behind them. It was beautiful, its boringness so singular and relentless.

“Oliver… trust me, I’ve wanted to fire you more times than I can remember. You’re too damn good though, I couldn’t do it in good conscience to the board.” “What, does the board own your soul now too?”, Oliver sneered. He could scarcely believe his impudence. If he focused on the silvery liquid sheets outside though, it seemed as if another, stronger man was speaking for him, his own body just a ventriloquists puppet, an apparition of 21^st Century mania. “I don’t believe you ever have to truly think about what you’re doing”, Joe continued, either ignoring or internalizing Oliver’s previous remark. “I regret I can’t give you something more…” he paused and his eyes, those little round pinholes between the earnest, fleshy slabs of American beefiness that framed his face, squinted with indecision. Oliver resisted the temptation to complete his sentence for him, as was his habit. So obnoxious. “Interesting.”, Joe finally said, the word a single sad note which caused his looming pectoral muscles to rise and settle slightly beneath his stiff, starchy Brooks Brother’s shirt like Saint Helens before eruption. He wondered if Joe had perhaps finally seen a bit of light at the end of the bullshit, as all this straight-talk seemed an affront to his usually tragic conflict mediation. “One more week”, Oliver said flatly, his voice still possessed by some unearthly arrogance. Joe nodded distractedly, his face still sad and indecisive.

They left the little break room adjacent to Joe’s mildly palatial corner office, the cubicle dwellers in the main room quickly returning to their awful buttons and screens, pretending not to have overheard their conversation. He didn’t care. They deserved a little entertainment, a slight reprieve from the vague dehumanization of spreadsheets and PowerPoint graphs. He should have been ashamed of himself, should have seen his father’s no-nonsense, pockmarked face boring into his failures equally out in the fallow brown fields of northern Vermont or in the futuristic angles of downtown Seattle, but instead he felt nothing. It was a wonderful apathy- appalling and stimulating him simultaneously, like watching porn in the college dormitories while your roommate was out, awaiting their unthinkable interruption.

Lloyd smiled at him knowingly as he passed his cubicle on route to the little storage-closet turned office he called his own. ‘Well-played, Ollie. You’re lucky he likes you so damn much.’ Lloyd was one of these Koreans adopted by progressive, outdoorsy upper middle class white people and coddled under the nervous umbrella of both their physical and cultural impotence. He was wonderful though; he’d played all the ‘right’ games- his Yale economics diploma shared equal space in his cubicle with a photo of him aside a half-dozen raucous, red-faced boys clutching a sailing trophy, the obscene spectacle of Seattle’s east Lake Washington waterfront neighborhood playing out behind them. He wasn’t wonderful because he played these games, of course, but because he saw the awful inequities for what they were and enjoyed them anyways, the lovely hedonism of upper class white people. He was tall and striking, his hair styled in the sharp, angular way only Asian men of a particular social stature seemed capable of doing, both suave and comical.

He wore a suit of impeccable fit and pedigree, which he freely admitted was extravagant, especially given the balding slob in the cubicle next to him who grunted and sniffled into his wrinkled, oversize Oxford most of the day, his tie an unruly serpent trying to escape his shirt’s grasp. On weekends, and sometimes weeknights if ‘corporate morale was low’, as Joe liked to say, they ventured cautiously from their overpriced, pseudo-hip lofts above the gaudy eye of the Space Needle over to Capitol Hill. Here they would rub elbows with deliciously insecure hipster girls and swill cheap beer, the countenance of the starving artist as fun as it was thin. Sure, there were ‘real artists’ here; Oliver envied them in secret fury, their easy style, the effortlessness they managed to cast over the shadow of food stamps and teary 3AM phone calls to parents about ‘fucking it all up.’ Lloyd and him found it fairly easy to appropriate their style, the subtleties of jean fit and music tastes that defined acceptance, yet he liked to think he was still his own man, regardless of who had liked a band when or ‘discovered’ some Kafkaesque dive bar in east Cap Hill first, his style merely overlapped theirs instead of pantomiming it.

“So, you going to the show this Friday?”, Lloyd asked him with practiced casualness. ‘What, RhinoBear or whatever the fuck they are called putting on half-assed falsetto’s in testicle-suffocating jeans about some cliché lost love?” ‘Yeah, something like that, Mr. judgmental.” “Oh stop…”, Oliver retorted, but he knew he was right. “You’re as bad as me. Besides, I have to finish this monthly by tomorrow afternoon, or Joe is going to can me for real.” “Oh, but isn’t that what we want now, rebellious young one?” Oliver smiled despite himself. He felt flooded, awash in strange emotions not his own, the endless drizzle just a mask he could place at will over life’s absurdities. ‘Yah, ok, I’ll go. You’re buying my ticket though', he conceded. ‘Oh really? Ok, sillyface', Lloyd shot back through a toothy grin.

Oliver respected Lloyd chiefly because while he could hold his own with the Cro-Magnon masculinity of the still-pimply 20-somethings next door he liked to call the “finance bros’, he refused to succumb to their mindlessness. Lloyd and him could talk about anything- the way the movement of Joe’s pecs secretly predicted the weather, if Joe had a small penis [Lloyd claimed he’d seen it one day in the office athletic club locker rooms and it was in fact of dubious stature], about how they secretly envied the way gay men managed to partner such enviable confidence and herculean folly, their narcissism both enviable and sour.

He’d told Lloyd once that he'd slept with several men, and he had laughed, poking fun at the hushed drunken urgency in Oliver’s voice, the was his eyes had dilated nervously with the desperate need for peer approval. “Girl… and you think I haven’t? It’s 2010. I think men are beautiful…fascinating. So much harder to read than girls. Maybe just my inexperience. If you enjoyed it, who cares?” He’d wrapped his arm around Lloyd’s strong shoulders, his expensive sweater creasing wearily under the weight of such fraternal camaraderie. Even if they were themselves the “bro’s” the derided, all was forgiven in the end, he told himself. He pushed these memories back into the neat drawers of his mind where he wanted them to remain forever, archived like the web history he deleted daily on his computer to hide the endless hours spent daydreaming on skiing or indie music webzines. Returning to his office, he drew the blinds of the single meek window such that the room was flooded with the ambiguous light of late winter in the inner reaches of the Pacific, the muted pastel shades that both encouraged and thwarted work. He spent several hours writing dilligently, preparing sharp figures and concise numbers on Cascadia Resources latest gold project, a chunk of swampy, foreign land in the Northwest Territories. Suddenly he rose from his seat and opened the window.

The little red lever reading ‘emergency exit only!’ which had always thwarted his curiosity failed to set off any alarm or otherwise incite unrest, so he stuck his head across the divide and looked down 630 feet of clean, chilly air to the asphalt façade of 5^th Avenue. He wondered how the brief seconds would feel, watching the windows blur as they sped by in increasing finality- first Seattle Light & Power, then Pacifica Investments, and finally the morbid floors where Goldman Sachs created inequity from thin, conditioned air. When the asphalt was finally reached, he wondered how long he would feel it- he’d always heard it was instantaneous, but what did instantaneous really mean? The brief pain would be redemption, the way the one ounce gold coin minted by his company he carried in his pocket felt when it pressed firmly against his thigh, its force protection from an often malevolent world. Then the rain would end, the looks, the stares from lovers and strangers alike which all seemed to mime ‘What are you doing with your life?’ The brilliant white light of forever would sweep it all clean- he’d bathe in the murky white noise as he’d dreamed about for as long as he could remember.

He looked up briefly and saw across the highway to the sad concrete and brick edifices of the Capital Hill projects, the single smokestack spine of the old lumber mill a middle finger thrust at the tasteless memorials to high-rise capitalism filling the skyline to the west. The rain was now firm and insistent, driving itself in dull tantrums across the chasms of downtown. He steadied his knees on the thin concrete windowsill so that the upper half of his body was perched above the abyss, held by a string of gravity and hope. He heard a firm tap on his door. It was not Joe. He would have come right in, and most likely inserted a good-natured jab at Oliver getting back to work instead of downloading porn or something similarly deviant yet expected. It must be Ralph Woodson. Shit. The ‘big boss.’ The one who ruled in tyrannical efficiency two floors above them in the sterile and featureless land of the board meeting. He must have heard. He didn’t think Joe would have reported him, but then again, Joe himself was uneasy of his job security these days, and with a third child on the way and his wife unemployed could certainly use a promotion.

His knees slipped unintentionally forward a few inches on the slick concrete. A single tear worked its way down his freckled cheeks, like a drop seeping out of a crack in a desert dam, insistent and terrifying. The sharps raps continued for another half-minute or so, followed by something indecipherable and brusque. All was silent again, save the dull murmur or traffic below and the gentle howl of winds blown down from Rainier and Snoqualmie. He stared directly down, as he’d done last summer when leading the crux pitch on the Grand Wall in Squamish, the difficulty of the moves offset by the surreal comma of cold granite which swept 1,000 clean feet beneath his shoes. The distance below him no longer felt real, and he steadied himself for the deliciousness of flight. Without warning, his pocket vibrated with an incoming text message. “What a fitting finale to man’s absurdity”, he thought sadly, but his narcissism forced him to look anyways. “Received March 10^th 2010, 11:49 AM. From: ‘Mom’ Message: “Hi honey, happy birthday! I love you and am so proud of you! Call me later?”

He feels himself rise suddenly, weightless perhaps. The window closes swiftly. The breeze struggles to return, yet it’s heft is forced to a place beyond where he is now. He is seated before his computer, and the tears pool in a salty river when they curve around his broad smile, his teeth all askew and telling stories of experiences that have made life unequivocally worthwhile. He’d call mom later. She was such a light- so strong despite dad’s slow loss of the farm, despite her own rural medical practice drying up in the greedy oven of the insurance business, she never relented; goodness was to be hers alone. He’d forgotten it was even his birthday. My birthday, he thinks to himself, like an Amazon native who has just learned that this thing between his chest and his waist is called his ‘stomach’, not just another piece of the self. He’d go see “RhinoBear” or whatever they were called this weekend, he’d call back Marie from last Sunday, wonderful Marie who’d walked him home at 4AM when the edges of the Styrofoam world had crumpled under too much cheap beer and expectation. But first, he turned and opened the door to his office, where instead of a furious Mr. Woodson, he found an ever sadder Joe. At first, he moved his lips to speak, but speech now was mechanical and pointless. Joe’s eyes were red as well. He embraced him firmly, indelibly, and hoped everyone in the neighboring cubicles got a damn good look.

'Howland'

Howland

Some thousand kilometers to the west, indelibly west of the Phoenix Islands, Akira had decided Japan was irredeemable. It was not that she was no longer his home- this fact was rooted in the sort of immutable ancestry even the most rebellious youth knew not to question. Nor was he a young man, he thought to himself, feeling the sharp graying stubble spread across his chin, the way it felt so authentic on flesh made soft and complacent by decades of office toil. The wind was fresh, insistent, a sort co-conspirator in his private obsession with reaching Howland. ‘Howland Island’…he mouthed to the vast blue nothingness, a lone petrel eyeing him suspiciously off the starboard bow. It was so pedantic, so thoroughly American a name, he thought. An oceanic mystery robbed of its wild vitality in the name of manifest destiny, of ‘international security’; whatever the fuck that meant.

He would never forgive them. Even today, some seven decades after the bright light of Hiroshima and the terrifying artillery rounds lobbed over Iwo Jima had faded into bronze plaques and school curriculums, he knew some transgressions were ‘forever’ as his father would have said. He knew though that not all Americans were like this, infused with the zealously blockheaded, square-shouldered evangelism of resource capitalism, of stale democracy, of festering suburbia. The trip across the sea was absolution, he’d told himself; like his hero Amelia Earhart before her fateful trip around the globe, he just needed to do it, to be the first. July 2^nd, 1937- ‘’I am quite aware of the hazards’, she had told the press before leaving the sloping rectangle of uneven asphalt on Lae Atoll, the little plane curving over the earth’s own unevenness towards Howland Island. Akira could remember quite specifically when he'd first learned of her name in 7th grade history class, the inspiration her story had given him amidst the quiet madness of the postwar years- the reparations, the shame, the national identity swirled into a global economic blender. Japan was strong- she was his, then and always, but things had begun to change. The well-paying job with Nashiko Securities up on the 53^rd floor of the ‘World Economic Forum’ building in the heart of Shinjuku at first had seemed like the fulfillment of the state-sponsored dream, the aspirations of humble farmers tilling black volcanic soil in the shadows of Mount Fuji. The real reasons of his employment had bared themselves in the following decades though, his unwitting placement into the great scheme of half-assed corporate integrity and ruthless capitalism which shredded the human individual into soft little slices of ‘net economic contribution.’ That his coworkers and superiors in the dull fluorescent aisles of the 53^rd floor actually spoke like this was subordinate to the terrifying earnestness with which they pursued such rhetoric- the evangelism of money, Akira thought sadly.

When he told Seika he was buying a boat, she was not surprised. He loved her- this was sincere and had not faded with time into the marriages of convenience and social stature he saw so many of his friends suffer quietly from. Their independence from each other seemed to follow this love, to solidify its earnestness rather than degrade it, as people around him seemed to think. After Kenji and Yukio left for university it was only natural that he begin to drift silently towards his own passions, smothered for so many years. The boat was adequate- he’d made it clear to Seiko from the start of this maritime lust that he didn’t want or need some excessive fiberglass yacht with flatscreen TV’s and little gaudy LED’s illuminating the foredeck, the type of monstrosities the Yakuza sharks motored a few languid kilometers into Tokyo Bay on summer weekends to snarf toro and coke off half-naked geisha girls. No, his boat was to respect the aspirations of a man never allowed to be humble, to fail, to see the shortsightedness of man across the great equalizer of the Pacific Ocean. He’d told Seika it would only be a month, and he hated himself when he felt his hand rise subconsciously out of his waistcoat pocket for a moment, wanting to slap the subordinate inquiry out of her giant aquamarine pupils.

Her face was perfect and pale, the skin held tight across balanced features that knew the pain of mindless discipline. They'd met at the University in Osaka, at that particular time of year when the cherry blossoms brood in all their tactless beauty and he almost envied the American’s lack of kawaii, or obsession with all things ‘cute.’ Seika was cute though, he reminded himself as the dawn broke in unspectacular evenness to the East. No- She was beautiful. Beautiful enough to come back to after glimpsing Howland Island in all its surreal barrenness. Perhaps he’d even touch the ghost of the indelible Ms. Earhart, yet know that she was merely an apparition, a boyhood fantasy compared to his lovely wife. She waited for him with delicious patience in their home under the wealthy eaves of Nagatacho ward, beyond the mesmerizing glass and steel chasms of Shinjuku, poisoning his thoughts at sea.

The island would reveal itself only at the last minute, this he knew. Somehow he still felt unprepared for its reality, to be greeted by a scarce two square kilometers of fallow white guano and stubborn grass perched on the cusp of the International Date Line. He liked to imagine the mysterious bathymetry beneath him, the boat gliding unwittingly over subterranean canyons and icy black depths where life struggled in anoxic tedium. Part of the appeal of course was that Howland was so thoroughly unlikable an isle. It was devoid of the fleshy, jovial Polynesians and neon palms that symbolized the equatorial Pacific to most Japanese. He saw flashes of downtown in his dreams now; the hordes of faceless tourists clustered around the Imperial Palace, the effervescent rich girls shopping in Ginza, their material charade masking a deep insecurity. He wanted all of it to be rigid and permanent, to make it available yet hidden to his memory out here on the even blue plane. He knew if and when he returned though, things would be different.

Perhaps he would finally understand why his father did it, why the desperately neat note about society’s hopelessness failed to stick in his mind as much as the lingering warmth of the .44 magnum, the way his mother hadn’t taken it from his hand immediately. He’d always been private about the war- it was Akira’s duty as a son to honor this paternal lineage, yet he was also tired of walking the thin line between honor and insanity. Things built, they coalesced out of the haze of modern superpower Japan, and the absolution of the sea was so much more appealing to him now that the cruel geometry of a handgun. Even today he saw his mother frequently- she still presided over the noble prewar townhouse perched overlooking nearby Akasaka, the memories of her husband and the war like the thin specters of smog and morning drizzle that drifted in from Minato Ward. To his surprise she’d encouraged him more than anyone in pursuing the boat- at his mere mention of it her eyes had lit with a fire he hadn’t seen since he introduced her to Seika or announced in restrained tones he was moving into the corner suite on the 53^rd floor. He wanted to escape for her, for the little girl playing in the ruins of ammunition bunkers and ancient temples in 1940’s Nagasaki, for the pushy smile Ms. Earhart always presented to reporters and other non-believers, the grin that said ‘follow me…if you can.’

The next day the western breezes presided again, and shortly before nightfall he saw it clearly through the brass spotting scope for the first time. It was so unimpressive and low that at first he assumed it was another fata morgana apparition of the oceanic twilight hours, the pairing of strange optics with desperation for terra firma. When he looked again though, it was still there- firm and vaguely malevolent across some 15 kilometers of now teal water. The edges of a submerged Fuji or Rainier rose to meet the surface, to present a humble, dead caldera on which seabirds could shit for eternity. He saw Earhart light- the squat, battered column of concrete meant to serve as some sort of primitive light. He saw how the pockmarks from WWII ammunition shone in the receding light, how they failed to honor the memory of a woman brighter than the aspirations of war or imperialism. He lowered the sea anchor from its seaweed and barnacle-choked compartment with mindless efficiency and brought down the sails in preparation for sleep, yet the effort was futile. He tossed and turned in the little aft bunk with the indecisive elation of a small child on Christmas Eve.

The next morning, it was still there- closer even, so he knew it was not just the recession of his mind amongst the blinding palate of the sea. When he anchored the boat on solid bottom some hundred yards off the isle, he could scarcely take his eyes away from its dead, raucous shoreline long enough to ready the little dingy for the trip ashore. It was awful. Stubborn grasses, sharp and calloused, hid between low, thorny bushes. These were flattened in places by the sheer volume of guano, which shone opalescent in the sun. He walked cautiously towards Earhart light, which enjoyed a commanding position atop the almost comically humble summit of the isle, a mound of phosphate rising some ten meters from the waves. Howland was transient, this he knew- the sea would consume it as it already was, each wave lapping slightly higher, catalyzed by the blocky gray power plant he could see from his home; the belching of an industrial world.

He tries to make himself aware of distances- 1,640 kilometers to the dead battlefields of Samoa, 3,030 kilometers to Hawaii’s beaches choked with fleshy American tourists, 1,780 kilometers to the hedonistic atolls of Pukapuka where the illustrious American escapist Robert Dean Frisbie eked out a tropical paradise. None of it means particularly much though, and he relishes this, the illusion or perhaps reality of mental solitude. It is almost noon accordingly to the Rolex oyster glinting in metallic obscenity across his wrist, and the sun eyes him acutely. It is now directly overhead and he feels his world is a barren fishbowl, the center of which he now stands in, unaware of the curving glass. An albatross clucks nearby but it is not in alarm- rather he feels he is welcomed, commended for being able to stand the terrifying immediacy of the isle. He smiles, taking a seat beside the concrete column of the light, and hears Ms. Earhart’s voice in the light breeze coming from the East, the fateful trajectory of her flight. ‘July 5^th, 1937. Last known contact. ‘Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. The more one does and says and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of the fundamental things like home, and love, and companionship.’ The ocean is silent.

'Ile De La Passion' /Edit

‘Ile De La Passion’

It never announces itself, though truthfully, he never expects it to. It just appears, like an albatross signals the approach of unexpected land, a winged messenger synthesized from the pale blue awfulness, so does the island come to be. When the boat nudges up against a dull crescent of sand, it is not the island pushing back at him so much as a hard crease in the murky warm liquid that has consumed him over the past month at sea. His mind is now made of salty, amorphous brine, it seems. The pillars of dripping white guano rising above the beach, fluorescent in the sun, fail to perturb his icy calm. ‘Ile de la Passion’, the French call it, though he feels this place is too primitive, too tied to the fickle habits of the sun and the wind to succumb to such arrogant colonial typecasting.

The air is still, hesitant but also complacent. The only sound he discerns is the incessant scuttling of millions of little orange legs, the alien-looking land crabs ready to carry him away like some bastard child king. He is not a child anymore though, this he knows, feeling the sharp stubble across his chin, the freckles spread like a badly drawn map of late adolescence on his arms. Lost in the translation of solitude, he fails to notice the two men who approach him with the bored confidence of home, their gait neither excited nor lazy. When they stand before him, he opens his mouth mechanically, but nothing comes out. Only a breath, followed by another shallower, more ragged gasp, the way a fish fights and then lies splendid and shiny on the docks, resigned to the inevitable.

The older, taller man, sporting a soiled maroon bathrobe and meticulously styled facial hair, introduces himself in flawless Parisian French as ‘The Governor.’ The younger man, trembling slightly with excitement, is a caricature of 20-something vitality. He rattles off a list of ‘nearby’ points in similarly brilliant French, before introducing himself as ‘The Subject.’ ‘Acapulco, Mexico: 1,080 kilometers. Socorro Island: 950 kilometers. Galapagos Islands: 2,260 kilometers.’ The young man smiles vacantly. Distances have no meaning anymore. They dissolved when Julia’s body sank like a ghoulish jellyfish into the translucent green water off Pitcairn Island, only to reemerge some hundred meters distant. He saw her white dress caught in the same lifeless stew the boat festered in, brilliant under the metallic eye of the sun. Or when the last of the Samoan deckhand’s lay supine and peaceful across the foredeck, his lips split apart and eyes sunken from the temptation of drinking seawater.

He hadn’t wanted to survive- he’d felt his youth pass before him like a train before relativity dissected time into a science, the way men grew suddenly old. This was before the world knew such awful truths as the Internet and transoceanic airplanes, of course. The wind wouldn’t allow it, he reminds himself. The Subject holds his head lovingly as he coaxes delicious tea and little neon slices of native fruits into his stubborn American mouth. Tears flow from his cheeks like the Ganges in flood, not from the physical revival of nourishment, but from the touch of another young man as unlikable and human as himself. The Governor stands before them like Napoleon upon arrival in Saint Helena, both infallible and terrified. At first, he says nothing, letting the intermittent sobs of the young man and the surreal cooing of The Subject compete with the crabs and the sun. Suddenly, he raises his fist toward the sky, as if the sun is a secret ally in his private tyranny, and speaks in unblemished English- ‘The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet the wild beasts of the island, and the Satyr shall cry to his fellow, and find a place of rest.’ He throws his head back in awful laughter and The Subject follows mechanically, their cries synchronized in surreal hysteria.

The young man feels himself rise suddenly from the sand like a phoenix, shedding the memory of Julia and the Samoan like the itchy golden grains that cling to his skin. In a swift motion, he fells both of them. Like chess pieces before an unruly god, they crumple to the earth and soon are nothing more than orange mounds, the crabs feasting jubilantly. ‘Welcome to Ile De La Passion’, the young man declares to the crescent of sand and the soft, fallow waves. Their edges fail to suggest the sterile magnificence of the Pacific that lies beyond the reef. When the sun finally is relieved of its weary assault on the island the Governor is nothing more than a moist skeleton, lying opalescent in the tangerine sunset. The crabs gradually retreat, as they have consumed what they knew was theirs to begin with.

The Subject has risen though, and the young man finds him to be even more beautiful and permanent than when they first met, when he slid bright slices of papaya into his helpless American mouth. He never knocked him down, it seems, he was always aside, always a ‘very bad man’ while referring to the Governor as an ‘exceptionally good man.’ Never had two people been more suited to each other, the young man thought, but he knew from first sight that The Subject was to be his alone. He completed him both physically and ephemerally- his vitality forced the memories of Julia and the Samoan out across the stale horizon. The Governor was merely an obstacle, an interference of their singularity. He still could not speak, so he knew that The Subject’s hold on him was firm and indelible. The young man lay helplessly aside him in the little hut made of palm fronds and thatch, while the crabs scratched against the inky black night outside.

The next day, he was not allowed to return to the boat. ‘I have everything for you here, my love. Do not think of them, do not think of those places, only of me.’ The Subject speaks to both the young man and the sea equally, though his eyes seem vacant and vaguely troubled, fighting the inward battle of isolation. His skin smells of strange oils and spices, and while he is fair and blond, his eyes carry the exotic colors of the east. He wears a long rectangle of mauve fabric around his torso, an ersatz sarong, it seems, and beneath this, thin, pale corduroy pants hacked off above the knee. The young man wants to devour him, to feel his sins absolved in some new purpose, the fulfillment of a month’s drifting across the Pacific. His family back in Boston, his research group and schoolmates at Yale- he knows they have all taken him for dead. Somehow the finality of being lost comforts him nonetheless; it is unflinchingly linear and unidirectional.

He wonders sometimes if The Subject is his brother, some distant lost Kin. He knows his love is not just fraternal though- it is a desperate, necessary protection from the awful pillars of dripping guano and raucous seabirds. Their personalities now feel nebulous, blending into a single animal constituency. He relishes this absolution from self, the distraction the elements provide. Small as it is, perhaps no larger than a few square kilometers, the isle provides for them in begrudging paternalism, yielding shiny fruits and sleek fishes in little bursts of sustenance. The Subject is like an albatross- flighty, distracted, prone to wander the sharp coral and mushy sand in search of pieces of colored plastic and torn nylon. The detritus of man is inescapable, it seems. He knows that when he leaves, the sea will swallow him as it has wanted to do from the start, and he will join Julia in the icy depths of solitude.

The Subject shows him his collection of once-buried treasure, assembled atop a few palm fronds and ripening coconuts in the safe cocoon of the hut. Coins of the most mysterious and fantastic enumeration greet him in flashes of silver and gold. The sun makes them looking gaudy and obscene, he thinks. He fills his cupped hands with them, letting them spill over into the sand with a satisfying ‘ching’ as they bounce against each other, their worth both an abstraction and intrinsic. The Subject kisses his neck; then bites it in jest, drawing him languidly across his lap so that their eyes are fixed and level a half-meter apart. He speaks to him in nonsensical French, the syllables all strong and convoluted- his secret, mindless love songs, the young man decides. The soles of his feet slowly grow strong and his flesh atrophies into leathery sinew under the sun. He is not weak though; rather he is composed fully of lean muscle, the complacency of American adulthood beaten out of him by the isle.

Sometimes they do nothing, letting the day wither under the near-constant battering of the sun, vengeful in these latitudes. In the late afternoon, dark blue storm clouds mass unexpectedly, and rain falls in warm, soft sheets that seem to insulate them from the terrible vastness of the sea. The young man is fed, he is loved, he is at peace, yet somehow his neurosis precludes truly mindless joy, his sins still cling to him like the vacant black eyes of the crabs. In the night, he clings to the Subject in fear; fear of the black nothingness, fear of Julia floating to the surface of his mind again like seaweed in the tide. The next day, in what is likely a week but could also be a month from his arrival, the Subject speaks to him unequivocally and directly for the first time.

'You must promise never to leave', he whispers in his ear as the crabs wander aimlessly across the beach, their orange carapaces brilliant in the dewy morning light. 'No', answers the young man. The Subject strikes him, not with intent to harm, but merely a violent afterthought of their oddly incestuous melodrama, and he falls into the warm sand. The young man is not angry- rather he is passive and limp. His mind boils yet his body is like Julia's- content to have its fate determined by someone else. 'I hate you, Oliver. You took me to this godforsaken place because you knew you could, because you have the goddamn charisma to fuck people over', he heard her say. In the next few minutes, their future had been decided, the awful black cliffs of Pitcairn island fading on the uneven horizon, a sight he’d wanted to forget was even land, so hopeless a place had it been to him. They had buried the Samoan there. The locals seemed to understand. They were kind, primitive people, beleaguered by their unspoken history, their indifferent resiliency. They were descended from the HMS Bounty mutineer's of some 2 centuries prior, but he knew from their first arrival that this was not to be mentioned.

He’d seen their culture as despondent yet also pure. The weathered mutineer was still apparent in their worn out smiles and calloused, bare feet, the stubborn volcanic slopes a collective skin they clung to. Julia had hated it. Lately though, she'd begun to hate everything, and at night he thought of her perfect lips, her straight blond hair she fussed incessantly over, how it would look wrapped in the wraithlike form of the sea. Twice he thought quite seriously of tying the stubborn lead stern anchor to his feet and jumping overboard. The Samoan, Tunga Mata'Afa, would have helped him. Now his cracked lips and hollow eyes stared in eternity at the fertile black soil above Adamstown, whilst banana and citrus roots worked their way through him, oblivious to life or lack thereof. It wasn't that he had killed Julia- he’d fulfilled her wishes. She could have done the same for him, but she was too afraid. He had at one point loved her- not in the way of flesh and thought, but in the abstract obligation one feels to assist another, to provide, to be infallible despite the circumstances. The islanders on Pitcairn understood this, how contrived and contextual love could be. When upon setting up order on the isle they initially banned alcohol, tobacco, dancing, and even public showings of affection, it was not so much repression as a response to the isle itself, its omniscient wrath.

He could have left her on Pitcairn. He knew setting off for the east was fatally flawed, the Achilles heel of his travels, but he went anyways. He didn't want to feel old or young, weak or strong- merely present. At first, she had been a spectator, there when he wanted her to be, and absent like land or the wind when he saw it fit. When the outer Cook Islands had failed to materialize past Rapa Iti, she was always there though. Always inquiring, always letting her giant blue eyes bore into his failures with the singularity of trust- theirs was the tragic pairing of two difficult people. From the moment he'd met The Subject, he knew that things, while not absolved, would now move irrevocably and unilaterally forward.

He was now able to catch tuna successfully on his own. The tight pull of the marlin line across his hands was better than anyone's touch, anyone's condolences- the tug of a fighting, animate thing in his hands the sort of high that breached the solitude. The Subject had shown him how to, of course- he was his now such that his own learning was merely an expression of his obedience, his lapping at the pool of inequity. The tuna never wore on him- it was red and fleshy without the blood, without the thought of taking a life. When he brought the fish up out of the dull turquoise lagoon, it fought viciously, dangerously, but soon the sun and sweaty air subdued it into a final stupor. He let The Subject slice it without the slightest thread of compassion, surgically removing little moist red cubes from sharp teeth and fins, and he ate them with the most metaphysical guilt. That evening, he spoke to the young man again. 'Oliver, you rescued me from the most painful apathy, you know. I kept up appearances for the crabs and the sun for so long. I drank the brackish, tainted water here like it was my own blood, scribed my name in the sand so it could be washed away by the next wave.' 'Where did you come from?', Oliver asked quietly, and immediately regretted it.

'It is not important, actually, it may not even be true, but I am from Paris’, answer’s The Subject in English. ‘I studied ecology at The Ecole Normale Superieure, was well liked, and generally a caricature of desirable style and physique. Not that I thought so highly of myself- those are merely the words of others.' He pauses to slice open a single coconut with a swift, ruthless motion of his machete, and the warm, milky fluid spills across his fingers as he hand’s it to Oliver. He drinks emphatically, as if for the last time. ‘When I came here, I knew it would be forever’, The Subject continues. ‘I’d never even left Paris, but when the land unfolded before me on the flight to Los Angeles, the sprawling desert’s of America, the great shining cities, I saw everything was in its right place.’

‘I stayed in LA for some time…I couldn’t tell you exactly how long. Time escapes me. Eventually though, things closed, got tight, threatened to hurt me. I went south. Ended up in Acapulco. God, it was awful. I felt so transparent amongst all the plastic, the thin people living out thin dreams on some overcrowded beach, drinking Margaritas subsidized by slaves.’ He pauses again to catch his breath, and Oliver draws his hand across The Subject’s abdomen instinctively, feeling its vibration, tight and youthful. The Subject sigh’s deeply, closing his eyes as he lies inertly across his lap. Outside the hut, the wind builds restlessly, pushing the sun off somewhere to the west. ‘So when I met the Governor, it was not simply that we were two difficult people, it was that our salvation was as much our mutual company as the place we were to venture.’ Sensing Oliver’s confusion, he tries to explain.

‘The formalities were that I was to assist him in tending the lighthouse and weather station here, our allegiance being to both the Mexican Navy and the French science bureau. I met him in the Acapulco city library…he joked that I was the only young person he’d ever seen there, and I told him we were part of the same Karass. So, we spent the rest of the day discussing Vonnegut and our vague contempt for the mainland, before he offered me a job assisting him on the isle.’ ‘The isle…’, Oliver whisper’s back to him. It sounds so lovely through The Subject’s lips, an incantation across the muggy evening air that he needs to feel it work for himself. ‘Yes, the isle’, The Subject replies, but he says it with a disaffected modernity that betrays romanticism; his relationship to this place is as dreadful now as it is necessary.

‘When I first arrived, it was such a bleak place, so terrifying and confrontational that I listened to every word the Governor spoke as if it were from god himself.’ ‘Why did things change?’, Oliver hears himself ask rhetorically, but the words are not his own. Perhaps the Governor’s spirit is hanging over them, he thinks- it is shrouded around the ghoulish white guano pillars, its voice the brittle waves that shatter on the outer reef. Here was a bleakness, an austerity he associated with the American Midwest, a gently rolling hopelessness that was simply colored in shades of neon instead of brown. He saw his youth in the mindless cornfields, the sun of August in Iowa the same as it was here- sharp and incessant. He’d met Julia there. She was product of the Middle American resolve, both plain and beautiful.

He’d been home from college in Boston, rutted in the dichotomy of his new ‘hip’ life at school and his roots, which were humble and earthy like the soil that crunched under his feet in the early January frost as he walked across the neighbors fields. They had gone to different high schools, the arbitrary line separating the two districts a stone’s throw from the modest little ranch she’d grown up in. Its gaudy, cheap plastic nativity scene was still out on the lawn- the aspirations of straightforward people. She was a decided dreamer though- worse than him, he’d known 5 minutes into their walk across the field together. ‘You see that hill over there?’, she’d asked him. It appeared to Oliver as a topographic disturbance barely worth noting. ‘That is the highest point for 50 miles in any direction.’ She informed him proudly. ‘Might even be the highest point in Iowa for all I know.’ He nodded slowly and tried to suppress the smirk creasing his lips.

She was indifferent, aloof in her own radiance, he thought, as she’d continued her seemingly incongruous story. ‘So, think of what it does to your dreams when this is a mountain- it flattens them, compresses everything onto the dead corn husks and mud we walk on.’ She sensed his judgment and added a quick qualifier- ‘Not that people here can’t be great- I think in a way they’ve figured out a private greatness people in the cities are too neurotic to decipher. I just mean it’s not for…’ ‘Not for people like us’, Oliver said, finishing her sentence, and they were nearly inseparable for the following two-odd years. Infallibly one, all the way until the shadow of Pitcairn island began to obscure her memory- two weeks, or perhaps it was two years prior. Their relationship had never been sexual, he’d told her from the start he wasn’t attracted to women that way. Sure, there had been sex; it had nothing to do with confusion, and he became quite certain of its necessity as the land faded with alarming finality off the ragged Maine coast, their journey having begun late last May.

‘You always have to be so certain about everything’, he recalled her chiding him as they cracked the expensive champagne bottle against the shiny fiberglass hull that warm May morning, his landlocked parents standing aside on the docks, wide-eyed and vaguely terrified. ‘This isn’t the sort of graduation present we envisioned’, his father had said gravely, but the twinkle in his eyes betrayed him, it spoke of the Midwestern insurance executive who never got to postpone the ‘real world’ when he was Oliver’s age. His mother was not pleased. She was a strong woman, squarely built with sturdy, square thoughts which flowed out of her head and past cascading blond ringlets, her eyes the furious blue of the upper Midwest Scandinavian. She was proud of him though, ‘so damn proud’, she couldn’t remind him enough if this, it seemed. He’d played their game, and partly made it his own- 24 and a fresh Harvard graduate, ready to be sprung unto the world in all its disorienting brightness.

Julia didn’t speak to her parents anymore, she’d informed him a long time ago. It hurt him more than her, he felt. His warm, insulated nuclear family always betrayed his thoughts of radicalism, of splitting in some new, unlikable direction. ‘If only they could see me now’, he thinks aloud. The Subject kisses him on the chest, knowing his thoughts once again. Feeling his touch, how it grates against the awful thoughts of Julia, Oliver cries out in sudden anguish: ‘Why did I have to do it? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck… I killed her! Did you hear me!?’ The Subject forces him down into his lap like he did on the first day, such that the sand and palm universe is temporarily invisible. He sees only the terrible sun and the strong, tan flesh of The Subject’s chest, which he finds neither attractive nor repulsive- it is simply there. ‘There is no ‘why’…only now’, The Subject replies in even distractedness.

Oliver doesn’t care if this is bullshit or not. He just wants to be spoken to, to witness something he can make more important than his own loathing. ‘Circumnavigating the globe’…it had sounded so romantic. It still sounded romantic, he thinks. Just to be moving again, to be off this isle…he forces the thought out of his mind. He returns to the past tense. The Subject is approving of this, though Oliver notes he has never wavered from the present. Even his own story is a sort of apparition, a half-truth spoken from beyond his own means. He sees himself in the first week of the journey, the weather miraculously calm; their bubbly laughter at the freedom of the open sea pantomiming the little white clouds adrift in blue nothingness. He sees them in the first real storm, the swells battering the boat- ruthless steel gray legions, Julia sobbing in quiet terror below deck. He sees the sky parting the next day like the chasms of hell the ancients spoke of, the mist rising over the even green horizon, and he wonders why it took so long to finally see god. The places, they have all blurred into a monochromatic fray such that the gray cliffs above Cape Town might be the impossibly green palms of the Seychelles, or even the rank squalor of the Jakarta slums, alive with sweat and yearning.

The Subject rises slowly from the sand outside the hut, as if to aid him in shedding the memories. It is evening now, and cooler than it has been since his arrival, he notices. Perhaps there are in fact seasons here, a way of distinguishing tomorrow from today, but he doubts it. ‘When I left Paris, I saw it not as a departure- there was no finality about it’, he begins to say. Oliver wants to stop him, to tell him that the isle is no place for all this juxtaposition of past and present, but he does not. ‘I felt I owed nothing to my family other than to be relentlessly happy and healthy, which I am.’ ‘So there.’, he adds emphatically after several minutes silence. ‘So there…’, Oliver thinks in lukewarm abstraction, but the loose ends of Julia’s death still rattle his contentment. He thinks of the surreal thermocline of the open ocean, where a layer perhaps only a meter deep of waxy bathwater floats above the icy depths such that one’s feet dangle into the crystalline edges of the void, suspended over so much cold nothingness.

The lagoon would never threaten him like this, he thinks- it is almost comical in its circular enclosure of their world, hiding none of the shadowy beasts one who has grown up in suburbia expects to find lurking. There were dangers, this was certain- somewhere between the first and second weeks, The Subject had taken him out into the aquamarine center of the lagoon, where the violent equatorial sun pierced some 15 meters of water, alive with darting frames of neon fish and coral. He’d handed Oliver a mask and snorkel and showed how to float so that only a 2-dimensional sliver of his body felt like it was actually submerged, he’d been compressed onto the even blue plane above the spiny reef. They glided over urchins whose spines seem to reach out a half meter, waving back and forth in the sluggish current menacingly. A small fish festooned in brilliant blue and gold fins meant to look like Dali-esque coral appeared from behind a rock- its face is the most striking aspect of it, so ugly and content, bulging eyes and lips that seemed both fearful and challenging. ‘Do not ever, ever touch one of those’, The Subject informed him gravely.

This ugly, humble little creature, a rare lionfish species, The Subject told him, was the source of his near brush with mortality a few weeks before Oliver’s arrival. ‘You know, I was insubordinate, questioning of The Governor until then. The pain… you cannot even begin to imagine. If I’d been stung by the dorsal spines a few seconds more, you would have arrived to find my bones bleaching in the sun like those rocks over there.’ Oliver shivers, glancing instinctively towards the surreal volcanic pillars, fluorescent even in the waning moonlight. ‘He revived me so thoroughly I wasn’t even sure if I’d been alive before the experience. I spent the better part of July wavering between life and death, everything was waxy and pale and rough, my skin boiled in the most horrendous blisters…I couldn’t stand the way I looked, it was worse than the pain.’ Oliver pushes aside the fact that his audience had consisted on the crabs and an insane Frenchman, he understands this private narcissism The Subject spoke of all too well.

When Oliver had struck down the Frenchman though, he didn’t see anger or sadness in The Subject’s eyes- they had been hardened by the vastness of everything, of the sea compared to the isle, of the present compared to the past. It was not that the Governor was tyrannical or barbaric, though truthfully they both knew he was. It was that he was an obstruction, his presence somehow invalidated theirs, and as two unlikables, they had no choice but to strike him down. They had first buried his body in the sand. The next day, seeing the way the crabs scuttled over the thin sand covering him, their empty little eyes atop black stalks hungry in anticipation, they decided to float him out to sea atop a raft of dead palm fronds. It took a while for it to breach the dull, mumbling waves on the outer reef- enough time for Oliver to be further critical of himself, the possibly trivial contemptibility of the two of them.

The next day, they will begin a new routine, The Subject informs him at dinner that evening. The time has come to leave. It will not be rushed, he assures Oliver with distracted authority. They will build a raft, something to make the Kon-Tiki look frail and humorous, he claims. Oliver doubts him. Not his motivation, which is genuine and overflowing, but the resources necessary for this. The island is already sinking- each day he knows the waves lap a little higher and retreat a little less, their onslaught catalyzed by some distant coal power plant in the American Rust Belt. The small, scattered palm groves that first seemed like private wildernesses now stand thin and transparent under the moonlight. He wants to be enveloped by them, but knows they are transparent. When he awakes the next morning, he frees himself from The Subject’s arms, wanting to glimpse the palms in the full honesty of the morning light.

They are thinner and more alien that ever, leaning sinisterly towards the lagoon, ready to reach out and cut him with their sharp green fronds if he gets too close. The island is not his own anymore. Nothing is his own, he decides. The young coconut milk, the ephemeral white liquid he used to think was better than water now pains his throat, he gags unconsciously if he tastes too much while drinking it. The bright neon slices of fish and fruit have become sickly sweet, infused with the gaudy pointlessness of the tropics. This is a land of fools and idleness, he tells The Subject. He replies that he’d rather be an idle fool in the tropics than a temperate wage-slave. The Subject has begun to rise at dawn each day, working feverously on the raft until his hands shine bright with blisters and eventually dull calluses. Oliver hates how they feel on his skin when they make love, all purposeful and leathery. He wants them to encourage each other’s apathy, to make excuses to god and perhaps the sun as well, resplendent in its mindless cheer.

Slowly, the raft comes together. Sometimes Oliver helps, but never out of motivation to leave, only because he wants to be near The Subject. He wants to watch his veins dilate in delicious proximity, to feel his breath warm and ragged across his neck as he holds a palm trunk in place while it is bound tight by vegetable sinew. Everything is the same to him. The day and night are barely distinguishable, just a contemptibly even cycle on the great overhead dimmer switch. He feels that the equatorial sun is the real culprit for all the terrible deeds done by men against each other in the tropics, imperialism and tribalism are merely slight approximations of its wrath. The rain is the only respite- each afternoon he sits in the shade beside the little hut as the clouds build, stripping the worn threads from his salt-crusted skin as the first drops wipe away the previous day’s indecision.

The Subject hardly smiles anymore- the raft has consumed him. It is too large now for him to manipulate by himself and Oliver watches it fearfully in the night, waiting for it to lift itself into the sea when he closes his eyes and abandon them. When they hold each other now it is mechanical- a necessity against the merciless assault of seclusion. Sometimes he thinks of love, if he has ever truly known it, or perhaps if he knows it now, his mindless sacrifice of self its truest appropriation. The gulls are his companions. They gather on the rock at the far end of the atoll each day with indifferent precision, perched above the water like the gargoyles of Versailles, which taunted the proletariat in the revolution, begged them to inquire their necessity. He cawed at them once, climbed arrogantly up the sharp black basalt and challenged them at point-blank. They merely looked at him with the same empty coal eyes of the crabs, too consumed in their own fate to notice him.

Exactly one month from his arrival, or so the little coral pieces he has arranged in the sand behind the hut tell him, The Subject suddenly tells him it is time to leave. Truthfully there is nothing abrupt about his statement- it is merely the crest of a dark, unspoken wave whose edges curl and froth until they come crashing down into action. On the morning of their departure a fresh breeze is blowing from the east, the first such wind he has noticed. He wonders to himself whether they will be swept to Mexico by the equatorial countercurrent, or back towards Pitcairn, towards Julia’s white dress bobbing in the swells, infinitely patient. He knows it does not matter- what he’d wanted in the first place is now not a want but an ultimatum, a fate as perfect as it is terrifying. As they row out past the reef, the crabs massed on the beach are visible for a long time.