Errantry: Strange Stories

Summerteeth

The rolltop desk in this cabin belonged to your parents, you told me last night. Earlier in the evening you pointed to a top shelf in the lodge kitchen, three blown-glass bottles shaped like little birds, red, piss-yellow, the deep brownish violet of kelp on the ledges outside.

“Those glass things were my grandmother’s. They were always in her house in Stony Brook. Now they’re here. It’s so weird, this stuff. All this stuff.”

I would have said, It follows you. I was there; I am here now. One of the things that followed you.

This morning you interviewed me in your cabin, your computer set up on another desk, a big microphone on a stand. You sat in the chair before the computer and adjusted the mike, singing snatches of an old Bill Withers song, whispering, clicking your tongue, snapping your fingers.

“Don’t look at this.” You pointed at the monitor. Fizzy spikes rose and fell as you spoke. “It can be distracting. Seeing your voice.”

You’re interviewing all the visitors to the island. One by one all last week, today, after I leave. The Marriage Project. They go to your cabin and you ask them Have you ever been married? What does love mean to you? The sound bites are beautiful, spliced into swooping piano cadences, your guitar. Back on the mainland flames erupt, lines of peoples snake outside airports. Here on the island, there is music, wind in the trees, the persistent thump of the windmill that gives us power, rising from the island’s highest point, a giant with one great eye. From your computer the sound of a woman laughing—we’re all doomed—your brother’s voice soft with alcohol. Your cigarette smoke in the cabin around me. Prayer flags strung from the ceiling, tiny red lights. A piano, every year the piano tuner stays on the island for a week in exchange for keeping it in tune. Your Gibson guitar. Bottles of your medication silhouetted against the window, sunlight glinting from the plastic vials like a tiny cityscape. A city I visit. You live there.

Neither of us lives here. Nothing can be sustained. Sex, drugs, art, electricity, even the trees. It’s over.

Yesterday morning you showed me a letter, written to you by the poet who left the day before I arrived. Almost twenty years younger than me; you showed me her poems as well. Hard-edged, hard for me to read.

“This letter she wrote to me. It reminded me of your letters.”

You handed it to me. The letter typed, an inky scrawl across the envelope. The boy in the tree. My name for you since we were seventeen. She has read all my books, she was explaining them to you, explaining what it means. The boy in the tree, a Dionysian figure, the consort of the goddess, a symbol of the eternal return.

Blah blah blah, I thought.

Then panic. My letters to you were written thirty-two years ago. She wasn’t born yet.

Yesterday we walked along the ledges above the sea. Immense granite boulders split in two; we jumped between them, that horrifying jolt when I saw the long black mouth opening and knew how quickly it could happen.

“I feel like it’s checking in on me regularly now,” you said. Matter-of-fact, as always. You lit another cigarette. Your voice dropped. “Every month or so it taps me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, just checking. Just checking in. Another month.”

I felt sick, with nothing to steady myself against. If you. If we fell. Eventually they would find us, or the tide would. No radio here, no TV; one computer tied in to a router. Sometimes I hear a burst of static and words bleat from the radio on Billy’s boat.

Everything is falling.

“We’ll go up that way,” you said, and pointed. A green spill of moss and lichen, cat firs. We clambered up the last long expanse of granite and into the woods, and returned to your cabin.

There are eleven people here. Writers, poets, painters. One performer: you. Your brother, who owns the island. A cook. The caretaker, Billy, who lives in Ellisport. Every year someone disappears; one person, maybe two. Usually they show up again in their hometowns, weeks or months later.

But sometimes people never come back. A few years ago, the body of one woman, a poet, was found in the woods near her home in Montana. Bones, hair, teeth; no clothing or jewelry. Her front teeth had been worn away to nubs. The first two joints of all her fingers were gone. There was no other sign of trauma. The official cause of death was exposure.

I arrived in Ellisport early in the morning. Billy came to get me in the boat.

“That all you got?” He looked at my one bag. “Some of these people, they bring everything. Cases of wine. One lady, she had two white Persian cats. She didn’t last long.”

“Cats?”

He nodded and peered at the boat’s nav screen. Outlines of rocks, Ellisport’s coastline. The island. “Traps, they don’t show up,” he said as the boat eased away from the dock. In the dark water, hundreds of bobbing lobster buoys, neon orange and green and blue and red. “That lady with the cats, she just showed up at the dock on the island yesterday morning, told me to bring her back. Never said anything, just left.”

“Maybe the cats didn’t like it.”

Billy laughed. “The cats were gone. She was freaking crazy about it, too.”

“Gone? Like they got lost?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Well, no. Something got them.”

“Like an animal?”

“Something. No animals on the island. I mean, birds. Sometimes a moose might swim over, that happened once.” He squinted to where the sun shone through the morning fog. Jagged rocks and huge clumps of drifting kelp. Rising from the fog a gray-green cloud, your brother’s island. “Nope. Something got ‘em, though.”

You were waiting at the dock when we arrived.

I could not stop trembling. We kissed in the clearing by the island sawmill. We had kissed the week before that at my house on the mainland, two bottles of wine, a joint. I hadn’t been stoned in twenty years. A stash I’d saved for all that time, for when I might need it. Medicinal; now.

The full moon rose above the lake, yellow. Liquid, everything falling away into your mouth. Salt, smoke, your tongue sour with nicotine. Lying on your bed last night you said, “This is a great blowjob—this is the most beautiful blowjob. Much better than the other night.”

“I was drunk then,” I said.

I kissed you last week for the first time in twenty-six years. Your smell was the same. Your eyes, I always write of them as green, leaf-green, sap-green, beryl.

But they’re not green. They’re blue, turquoise, the most astonishing aquamarine. Liquid. Everything else about you is burning away. When I licked the blood from your cock I tasted ash. Your skin like the leaden bloom that covers the tiny fir seedlings in the forest; I touch it and it disappears, until I draw my hand before my face and smell you. Rotting wood. Rain and the sea. Blue not green. That glow from the mainland. Everything is burning away.

“I had an ominous voice mail from my dentist.” You lit another cigarette. We were sitting by the picnic table outside your brother’s house on the windward side of the island, the only place where a cell phone can pick up a signal. All day long people drift there and back again, walking in slow circles, talking to ghosts on the mainland. “He said, Angus, call me right away. We have to talk about your X-rays.”

You laughed. I felt my heart skip. “Are you going to call?”

“Nah. When I go home. I don’t want to hear any of that shit here. Work. Someone else quit this morning. Everyone’s leaving.”

You shook your head and laughed again. “What, do I have teeth cancer? I’m not afraid of dying.”

I stared out at the water, a lobster boat heading towards Ellisport. “Lots of people have fake teeth,” you said. We walked back to your cabin.

After breakfast this morning I brought two of my books over to the lodge and left them on a table in the reading room. My other books are there, all the stories I wrote about you. We are on an island, surrounded by the reach and the open Atlantic. I am surrounded only by you.

What we took: cellphones, computers, paper, pens, paints, canvas, guitars, a harmonica, wine, scotch, beer, vodka, marijuana, amphetamines, cold medicine, sleeping pills, cigarettes, volumes of poetry, warm clothes, iPods, two white Persian cats. What we left: wives, husbands, children, cars, houses, air-conditioning, TVs, radios, pets, houseplants, offices. Everyone keeps talking about those cats.

Everyone here is working on something, feverishly. You are doing The Marriage Project. You interviewed me and I spoke of my brief marriage. How inconsequential it is. All those interviews, all those people telling you about their first marriage. All those chopped-off voices. Yesterday I saw a letter on your desk dated months ago, when the mail still came on time. Little Buddhas lined up on top of your computer. Taped to the wall above the piano, pictures of your children. The two grown girls; the three children by your second wife. I sat on the chair in front of the mike and removed my glasses. Not for vanity, but because if I saw you clearly I would not be able to speak. The air inside the cabin was close, pine resin and cigarette smoke, marijuana, Shambala incense. Your sweat. The tang the medication leaves on your skin; bitter. You wore jeans, leather moccasins, a tie-dyed T-shirt. I shivered uncontrollably and asked if I could wear something of yours, so that my voice wouldn’t break up for my trembling. You gave me a brown zipped sweatshirt with yellow stripes, a fake heraldic sigil. The kind of thing someone might wear in high school. Did you wear something like this, a jacket, a sweater?

I can’t remember.

There is a painter here named Annie. You’re obsessed with her.

“Annie, she’s a feral artist,” you told me. We were in the lodge kitchen. The cook was chopping parsley for dinner at the long wooden countertop. Bottles of wine on the long mahogany table Billy made, your iPod on the counter. The Beach Boys, Outkast, “Hey Ya.” Happy music. The cook was dancing. “She gets up every day before the sun comes up and goes out to her rock and just stays there all day, waiting.”

“For what?”

“Who the fuck knows. The right moment. The final curtain. She stays there all day, she only comes back here at dinnertime to eat. She doesn’t talk much. She paints, just this one spot. Her rock. She’s been coming here for three years now. I don’t know when she sleeps, she works all night and goes out again at 4 a.m.”

Annie.

That night I met her at dinner. Tall, rawboned, long straight straw-colored hair. Slightly rough skin, wide-set gray eyes. She wore stained khakis, a blue sweater, ancient hip waders. Big hands, the nails chewed down to nothing. She spoke very softly, her gaze flickering around the room the whole time.

“So you just go out there and work?” I asked. We were drinking red wine, moving slowly around the perimeter of the room. Annie kept her head down, her hair obscuring her face. Now and then she’d look aside, furtively, then gaze at me head-on for a moment before turning.

“Yes.” Her voice soft, without affect yet musical. A swallow’s voice. “On the far side of the island. By the rocks. Those trees there.” She held her wineglass in one hand and kept the other hand in her pocket. “That tree. Yes.”

“And you just… wait?”

She looked up. Her eyes flared. “Yes.”

Her expression never changed; only those eyes. As though something moved inside her skull, cutting off the light. “Yes,” she murmured again, and walked away.

“You know what I started to think about?”

You stared out at the edge of the woods, cat fir and moss-covered boulders, birch trees. Sea urchin shells broken on the rocks. “A woman having sex with a dog. Like a wolf or something. If she tries to get away, it rips her throat out.”

I laughed. “I would never say something like that.”

“Yeah. A really big dog.”

Each cabin contains a single bed—a cot, really—so narrow it can barely hold one person, let alone two. At night I lie beside you as you sleep, your head turned from me, your arms curled up in front of your face, your fingers curled. Like one of those bodies at Pompeii. On the windowsills burn candles in small glasses. The smell of smoke on everything. My own skin; my mouth. Everything burns.

You asked me, “Have you noticed how you can smell things here?” We sat on the cabin steps, sheltered beneath cat firs, and watched rain spatter the rocky beach below us. “Things you never notice back there, you can smell them here. I can, anyway. Like I can smell my brother when he’s way down the path. And Annie—I went down to her place yesterday and I knew she wasn’t there, because I couldn’t smell her.”

“Can you smell me?”

You stared out at the water graying beneath the storm. “No. You smell like me.”

“The light,” I said. “That’s what’s different for me. The light everywhere, it’s so bright but I can look right at it. I can stare at the sun. Have you noticed that?”

“No. I mean, a little, maybe. I guess it’s being on an island—the water everywhere, and the sky. It must all reflect off the rocks.”

“I guess.” I blinked and it hurt. Even with my glasses on, the dark lenses—my eyes ached. I turned and looked at you. “Hold still, there’s something caught…”

You grimaced as I touched your tooth. “A piece of fluff,” I said, and scraped it onto my finger. “There.”

I stared at the tiny matted wad on my fingertip. At first I thought it was feathers, or a frayed bit of cloth. But when I held it up to the light I saw it was a minute clump of hair, silky, silvery-white.

“That’s weird,” I said, and flicked it into the rain.

That evening before dinner I stood on the porch at the lodge and stared out to sea. The wind so strong I wondered about the windmill, that sound like an airplane preparing for takeoff, steady thump and drone. When the wind dies, the windmill stops turning. Power fluctuates, the lights flicker and fail then shine once more. A vast black wedge of cloud loomed above the reach and sent spurs of lightning across the water. Each bolt seared my eyes, my nails left little half-moons in my arms but I didn’t look away.

“You should be careful.” Annie came up beside me, wrapped in a brown sweatshirt with yellow stripes. She pulled the hood up, her hands invisible inside the sleeves. “It will hurt you.”

“Lightning? From way out there?” I laughed, but turned so she wouldn’t see my face. Your shirt. “I think I’m okay here.”

“Not lightning.” She crouched beside me. The hood spilled over her forehead so that it was difficult to discern her features, anything but her eyes. “Oh, poor thing—”

She reached for a citronella candle in a large, netted glass holder. A brown leaf the size of my hand protruded from the opening. Annie tilted the glass towards her, wincing, then stroked the edge of the leaf.

“Polyphemous,” she said.

It wasn’t a leaf, but the remains of a moth, forewing and hindwing, each longer than my finger. The color of browned butter, edged with pale-orange, with a small eyespot on the forewing and a larger eyespot on the hindwing. The spots were the same vivid sea-blue as your eyes but ringed with black, as though the eye had been kohled. Within a sheath of yellow wax I could glimpse its body, like a furred thumb, its long feathered antenna and the other wing, charred, ragged.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “That’s so sad.”

She lifted her finger, brown scales on the tip like soot. “The eyes, when it opens its wings suddenly they look like an owl’s eyes.”

She set down the candle and pressed her hands together, palm to palm, then spread them. “See? That’s how it scares off whatever tries to eat it.”

“What’re you looking at?”

You came up the steps, stopped beside Annie and glanced down at the candle.

“It’s a moth,” I said.

“A Polyphemous moth,” said Annie.

You stared at it then laughed. “What a way to go, huh?”

You lit another cigarette. I held out my hand and you gave me the lighter. I flicked it and stared at the flame, brought it so close to my face that I felt a hot pulse between my eyes, you and Annie blurred into lightning.

“Hey,” you said. “Watch it.”

“She keeps doing that,” said Annie.

“Listen to this.”

We were in your cabin. Another night, late. We’d left everyone else by the bonfire. A meteor shower was expected, someone said; maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. No one could remember when. You sat in front of the computer and stared at your files, lines and graphs, adjusted the volume then leaned back. “Listen.”

Crickets. Outside faint laughter and voices from the fire, wind, but no insects. The crickets were inside with us.

“You’re recording crickets?” I asked.

“No.” Your brow furrowed. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. These are the files—”

You tapped the monitor, columns of data with initials beneath them, words and numerals. “Those are my edits. But something got screwed up. I played them back this afternoon and this is all I get.”

A steady line moved across the screen as crickets sang. You stood abruptly. “Come on, let’s go look for Annie. I want to see if I can find her in the dark.”

We walked into the woods. Behind us the sound of crickets faded into your cabin. The dull orange glow from the bonfire disappeared behind the trees. It was cool, autumn weather not August. Wind brisk with salt and the scent of rugosa roses in bloom along the beach. Sky filled with stars, so many stars; a lake that holds a burning city.

Annie’s rock was on the far side of the island and faced the open sea, a narrow spur of granite like a pointing finger. A fissure split its center, water pooled there and the pinpoint reflection of stars. You took my hand so I wouldn’t fall. Twisted birches grew between the rocks, their leaves black with salt. Even in the dark I could see them.

But we couldn’t see Annie. You called her name, quietly at first, then louder. At our feet waves lapped at the rocks; behind us, in the ferns, crickets. I heard bats ricochet and whine above our heads. You kissed me and we fucked on the rocks, my hands and knees soaked and bloodied. Your nails broke my skin, everything hurt so much that lights flashed behind my eyelids. I blinked and the lights were still there, streaking down the sky, a soundless eruption of green and crimson.

The voices by the distant bonfire softened into insect song.

The wind died, the windmill, the sound of a falling plane silenced. You held me and we were completely still. Neither of us came. In the trees above us the muted flutter of wings and two round eyes, green not blue; a soft flurry as it lifted from the branch and something soft fell and caught between my teeth.

“That was an owl,” you whispered. “I think it was Annie.”

You laughed. As we walked back to the beach we heard a low wailing from the other side of the island, one voice then another, and a third. Coyotes. Everyone was gone. The bonfire had burned to embers. You gave me your lighter and I started the fire again, fed it birch bark and twigs and red oak logs until the flames rose. In the sky above the sea things fell and burned. I watched as you walked along the beach, the red tip of your cigarette as you danced and swayed and sang. In the darkness something swooped above your head.

You should be careful, she whispered.

I held my hands in the flames until they glowed.