‘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 a 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. They are 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.
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