The Seven Seas

 

            Fingers of light rotated through the slender spaces between the palm leaves above as the hours progressed, directing Mitzi’s gaze. First to the old water pump, with its new easy handle and platform. Then to the brand new spare quarters, a box-sized mud hut, which she called her “poet’s cottage,” and where she planned to put in many afternoons of thought. Then to the space in the thicket at the edge of the compound where a path had been machetted, leading to the sea. From here she could feel no wind, yet the ocean, the object of her desire, lay waiting only fifty yards away, waiting for her footsteps to temporarily spoil its smooth, unfettered surface.

            She rearranged her skirt, wrapping the fold more snuggly around her legs. The cloth was thin since she needed little to cover, in the air, which was comfortable yet kept her from being too industrious. She recited the names of islands, memorized when she was a child.

Assorted A - Z: found in a variety of bays, channels, lakes, rivers, seas, straits, etc: Akimiski, Aland, Alcatraz, Apostle Islands, Baffin, Banka, Banks, Beaver, Belcher Islands, Belitung, Borneo, Bornholm…

            Disentangling herself to come here had not left her unscathed, and a part of her did not want to see anyone. Yet she had looked forward to her visitor, arriving by plane in an hour. While she had received supplies and put up with local workmen from the mainland to set her facilities in order, she did not have to speak more than a few business words. They came and they left. This visit would not be so simple.

            One morning at the company they had both worked for, only half a year ago, Mathew had extracted all the information he wanted out of her. She had listened to the lecture on “Lead Generation” earlier that morning from her close vantage point in the room opposite, the living room which had been converted to a conference room in the little three-story Craftsman house the company rented in Berkeley. She placed her thick Irish sweater every morning over the back of her desk chair because she had no peg to hang it on. Her makeshift reception area was in face the house’s original entry way, and on her first morning there she had stuff the arm of the chair under the desk, and her thumb with it, for there was little space between the desk and the wall behind it.

“Are you going to buy a home,” Mathew asked.

“My student loans get in the way of any kind of investment. I’ll be paying them off forever.”

He was a salesman, but she forgot that as she stepped into his words. She had treated him as she would a potential friend and he treated her, she realized now, as a potential sales lead. She could not see everyone who spoke as she collected the faxes from the fax machine and answered one call after another, walked around the corner to the kitchen to make fresh coffee, and refilled paper in the copier, but she could hear everything in the small, echoey building, and knew who the voices belonged to even though she had only worked there a few months. She found out that to the salespeople, anyone was a potential lead, and therefore, a potential sale. The idea was to focus on getting leads, she learned, for you never knew when they would make good—in months, a year, or years ahead. Mathew had her believing he was sincerely interested in her as a person, with his smooth skin, curious eyes, willing smile, and smooth, sweet low voice. More than that, during weeks of impromptu talks by the coffee machine she heard in his words colors of a potential future together.

Seven Seas prided itself in selling properties that no one else could sell—lake-front properties  boasting houses with enormous porches, where ducks and geese reclaimed their rightful land, cliff-bound geometric palaces with windows in San Diego, sandstone shelves in love with erosion. One island in the Pacific, with lush vegetation and a series of intimate huts, was surrounded by sharks and no one could get off, rendering it unsalable. The forces of nature knew no bounds when it came to the company, a growing national entity that had as its main feature seminars on salesmanship.

Now, she clearly saw the sales techniques disguised as good-will entreaties and wondered how she could have been fooled. This was how the company could present as viable an island off the coast of Scotland that had been abandoned because the original inhabitants could no longer sustain themselves, after an oil spill in the North Sea. And this is how Mathew could mesmerize Mitzi with an island in the Caribbean. How did he know her secret wish was to live on an island? She had charted expeditions to all the islands in the seven seas, and had in the last ten years visited two islands. By herself, she had spent over a week on Inismore, the largest of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. And with her former boyfriend she had camped on Vancouver Island’s west coast, where campsites were cut out from the brush in a key-hole shape. At sunrise golden foam on the beach laced with lonely currents from the rainforest, minerals swirling clear blue and green. They bought lunch at a crab shack in Tofino, picked out the meat with little fork tines, watched tourist planes swish around the inlet.

“I haven’t just heard about it, I’ve seen it myself,” Matthew said, talking about Seven Seas’ newest property opportunity. “I took off one day, from where I was staying, on Tortola. From the town square of Roadtown to Sandy Cay it seems like no distance at all. When you hit the sand and take off your shoes…” His eyes drifted off to the side of the room, but really he seemed further away.

He had hovered over her, as she sat at her desk, taking her computer through a digital slide show. One picture made the island look like a tiny head with hair sticking up out of it, palm trees on a circle of land.

“I shot this picture from the air. It really takes fifteen minutes to get from the cottages in the middle of the island to the beach.” He pointed to other pictures, which showed a sheltered cove edging graduated green and ice blue water, and a curved shack with a cluster of picnic benches, under a sun-dappled layer of palms.

“It looks a little dilapidated,” she said, hoping to hide her dismay.

“It won’t take much work to restore them, and with cost of local labor, you’d be surprised what you can buy in the Caribbean,” he assured her.

He spoke as if he expected her to buy the island. Silently, she continued to peruse the images, including underwater scenes (she hadn’t know Mathew for an underwater photographer, or perhaps a professional took them) offering yellow and red coral, sea anemones, feathery fern-like plants, and another plant with tubes that looked like giant microphones covered in a gray foam. One huge coral was shaped like a long-fingered hand, stretching upwards towards the light. The lower part of the plant, near the base, had a deep purplish brown color, but the longer parts, such as the fingertips, were beige.

The fine grained white sand and light green water beckoned as many islands had, since she was a girl, when she would spread out maps around and underneath her on the floor of her room. She amazed and confused her parents by memorizing islands of the world in geographical groupings. When she couldn’t sleep, imagining that someone was turning the lock on her bedroom door or hearing snakes squiggling under her bed, only waiting until she was asleep to strangle her, she would recite the names of islands to calm herself.

.Atlantic Ocean, north: north of the equator: Alderney, Azores, Baixo, Belle-Île, Bermuda, Bioko, Block, Boa Vista, Borduy…

Mitzi had felt Mathew’s breath against her neck as she gazed at the computer. In spite of herself, she couldn’t take her eyes off the images of the island. Finally, at the bottom of the page, as she scrolled down, was a blurb, written in Seven Seas’ hearty fashion. “Gilligan should have been so lucky! Perhaps the most photographed island in the world, this tiny desert island is situated 3 miles south of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. Sandy Cay features a long white sand beach and palm trees, like any descent tropical desert island should. Also present are two rustic cabins of native stone, picnic tables, lavatories and showers. Nothing complicated, just an idyllic island in the sun. 1.75 acres, US $1,820,000.”

Mitzi gasped, and Mathew must have noticed. She turned to look at him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know you don’t have the bread.” He was sometimes less formal with her than with his clients, as he slipped from salesman to seeming-friend.

She had told him repeatedly that she couldn’t afford to buy property on her salary, and that she didn’t need to anyhow because she was bound to her houseboat, moored in a dock in Pt. Richmond, among the other funky floating but not necessarily sea-faring constructions.

The light shifted from the path leading to the sea to the large statue she had erected at the entrance to her hut. She had brought it with her at great difficulty, concerned for it’s cracking amid the jostling move, and she had packed it carefully among multiple layers of plastic and corrugated cardboard. She craned her neck around to gaze at the green stone, serpentine. It reminded her of the distinguished statues of Easter Island, submitting to the salt air, erect until they had no choice but to shift. The smooth, large figure had been given to her before she left for good, and reminded her Angel Island with its towers of swirling green, and Mount Tamalpais, the Cataract trail, its stream leading past one soaked green boulder after another as it climbed through Laurel and Oak. A close friend had given her the wide-eyed figure as a parting gift. She had greeted it as a friend every time she had visited him, remarking on its half-smile, and now it greeted her every morning she stepped out, as it would greet everyone who visited the island. But it reminded her too, of all she had left behind.

She had lived in the floating community, attached to a long pier just north of the Richmond San Rafael Bridge for years. The assemblage resembled a 1960s commune, with wooden-shingled fronts, macrame plant hangers, and driftwood sculptures. She had put together her own six foot owl with curved pieces of wood with hubcaps for eyes. The boats kept the theme, with driftwood signs posted at their doors, announcing their owner’s pop music inclinations, like “Sugar Magnolia,” “Rolling Stone,” and “Rotten Peaches.” But the names also reflected other tenant’s more literary passions, with “Misbegotten Moon,” “Iolanthe,” and Mitzi’s own “The Ugly Toad,” among them. A pun on her favorite play “As You Like It,” she thought of living on the water like Shakespeare’s forest of Arden, where anything was possible. Her cat, Tippo, who strikingly resembled her childhood cat of the same name, kept her company most nights, except Thursdays and Saturdays, when she frequented the Victorian bar of the Old Mac hotel. Her friend Bernard played jazz piano there, and she allowed herself to follow his old Mercedes back to his place across the Bridge to Marin, in her Volkswagon bug. He too lived on a houseboat, but in Sausalito, and his was a palace compared to her humble abode.

Her sojourns with Bernard had taken on an eternal twilight, as they met in the half-lit bar of the hotel and left after his three sets were done and he had finished chatting with the regulars. By the time they left it was after midnight, after his worshipping throng dissipated to another bar down the corner open until the wee hours. Bernard’s local celebrity status began and ended there, not because of any lack of talent, but because he threw back one too many whiskies during the course of an evening. His day job, which he said was like dreaming, as he blotted out model’s blemishes on Macy’s website using Photoshop.

When she first heard Bernard, he was surrounded by locals at the Baltic, swinging their arms and gazing up at him as if he was a cult leader. She could hear was the piano even if she couldn’t see more than the top of his head, as he competed with the sounds of people chatting at the bar or at the tables. The Mac never had a shortage of patrons and that night, the old place was in full swing, the stained glass lamps reflecting many wine glasses, the large wood scrolls over the bar resonating with voices. She would learn to come later, when only the diehards hung on to their bar stools. But that first time, she arrived around 8 o’clock, the clatter of dishes back in the kitchen. She headed to a side table, so she could see but not be seen. She sat admiring the delicate wood curls around the edges of the booths and the busy green and gold Victorian wallpaper on the ceiling, its pattern fighting with itself. At the break, she looked towards the piano, only to see the piano player making a swerving line for her table. He must have been going at full-motion, because when he stopped, he stopped with a jolt, almost falling over the table.

“I hope you don’t mind—” He stopped before continuing. “—my joining you?”

“Of course.”

He sat down suddenly, dwarfing the chair with its tall rounded back, high against Mitzi’s own frame.

“So you’re the fingers behind the crowd.”

“Yes.” Red-faced, buoyant, his head had a round shape like a red ball. If she tossed him in the sea, Mitzi thought, he could float. His pale skin was interrupted by blotches of red and broken capillaries erupted down each side of his nose, which looked like it had been broken a few times, with the bone zig-zagging one way then another. His arms, peering out of the hastily-rolled sleeves, had no shortage of freckles, and graying curly hairs popped out of his pale striped shirt, which was unbuttoned a halfway down his chest. His mop of hair had obviously not seen a comb or brush for some time and he looked twice her age, but didn’t act it. Whatever he had came through his music, and his followers knew it.

“I would invite you to sit at the piano, but I don’t think those dogs would let you in,” he said, swinging his head back towards the piano, a motion that should have snapped a few bones. But his body moved like a rubber band, exempt from the normal motions. The waitress appeared, setting down a short, thick glass for him, which he picked up, holding it between his thumb and pinky, a syrupy liquid swirling around with a green leave floating at the surface. She asked if Mitzi wanted another glass of wine.

“Mint Julep,” Bernard called out, slamming his fist on the table so her wine glass jumped. “You have to try these here.”

Every time after that, when she visited the Mac, darkness descended before she entered. She would wind her way past the oil tankers of the refinery, pastels against a dark palette, sleepy and satisfied in shadows. When she reached the bar, except in summer, darkness remained when she and Bernard left for his place. He would gently lower the lid of the piano for the night, running his hand along the cover to the keyboard before closing that as well. She would follow him over the Richmond Bridge to his houseboat in Sausalito, skirting the bay on the long, low bridge in the darkness, as if avoiding the sky altogether, and enter his dwelling, greeting the statue. And when she left his place too, Friday mornings, it was not quite light as she made her way back across the bridge and to her job in Berkeley. Sunday mornings, she always found some excuse to get back home, either to feed Tippo, who she actually didn’t need to feed until the evening, or because she had to get together with one girlfriend or another.

Unable to put the island out of her mind, Mitzi kept coming back to the piece of paper she had printed out, information she had researched about what Mathew had shown to her. She had found an article that made her hair bristle: “The world's smallest lizard has been discovered on a tiny Caribbean island off the coast of Tortola. The newly-discovered species not only ranks as the smallest lizard, but it also is the smallest of all 23,000 species of reptiles, birds and mammals.” Stretched out, the article said, the little creature was no larger than a quarter. She had read, as a child, of the special creatures of the Galapagos Islands, and a friend had even told her that a miniature elephant once existed there, which she believed for years.

She had wondered how could she buy an island which was considered endangered, like Sandy Cay? What business did Seven Seas have selling it? How did they get past the conservation charter, which would stop any development on ecologically-sensitive areas in the Caribbean.

But what had broken her from the possibility of Mathew was not his vague pressing her to buy the island—it was what she heard during the seminars at work. She had lays in her bed at the end of the week, reeling from all that she hard overheard from the conference room. Mathew and the two others in his work team, for realtors often worked in pairs or groups, shared personal experiences with clients with a small audience of other agents from their office as well as agents from other company offices.

            After the introduction by Don, the leader of the group, Mathew had spoken. She heard his voice start at a low tone before it swelled and she took a message from a client on line one.

“She got to the top of the stairs and puked some more—she was on a high—it was the most we had ever experienced since Eric and I started working together. She purged. We had clinched the sale of the house and had another appointment, but by that time she couldn’t stop, and as we walked her down the stairs, she puked some more, and as we opened the door and said goodbye she puked some more. And after she said goodbye, she stood outside on the steps for another five minutes puking!”

“All right!” said Don.

            Mathew’s audience gasped. “But how did you do it?” asked one man. He must have been a visiting realtor, for she couldn’t identity his voice.

            “It took us months, and many clients before we figured it out. Instead of putting ourselves out there, we held back.”

He stood at the front of the group, his hands together like a preacher, a smile slowly spread over his face. He paused like that for a moment. “People essentially want to talk about themselves.”

            Murmers of “yes,” and “it’s true” peppered the small living room. One woman clutched her real estate book tightly, mesmerized.

This was the second meeting of the day addressing other agents, and had a theme of empowerment. The next speaker was Mathew’s colleague Eric, clean shaven to the point of intended baldness, with a dark blue shirt and matching yellow and white-striped tie and pocket handkerchief. He made overtures appropriate for a Southern Baptist revival, commanding that unwanted babies and sex for the sake of sex—in fact unbridled passion in general—went against God’s wishes, and that securing property was the needle that would thread through the camel’s eye. He had them in a fervor, and when they came out to the hallway for the break, one woman drooped herself over the reception desk as if she needed something to hold her up. Mitzi could see beads of sweat on the woman’s forehead as she lurched, and her bosom motioned in her direction from the low-cut frills of the peach colored ensemble.

That night Mitzi had lay tossing amid the storm ringing around Bernard’s houseboat, while he snored loudly beside her. The force of water hit the side of the boat. She was used to the moods of winter, its roaring, its claws, yet this was the fiercest storm she had ever heard. She struggled with sleep, unable to stop thinking of how Mathew had lured her along with what she thought was a relationship. Lying next to Bernard, she thought this. She didn’t know what to say to him. She closed the door to the hatch quietly. Like a passenger who leaves their airline bag in the quay, unable to take the weight along, she left him sleeping that morning. Her flight left the next evening and she had more packing to do before she was ready to leave on her vacation to her very own island of Sandy Cay. She need to do some prepatory work there to make it livable, for a time years ahead where she would be able to move there permanently. And while her next door neighbor would watch Tippo, she felt guilty as always and intended to spend a full day with him. She had gotten no sleep that night, as she hadn’t planned on going back with Bernard to his place and so didn’t have her car and didn’t bring her contact case and solution to the Mac. She had thought she would say goodbye during his break and walk home then and there, but she couldn’t leave at 9 and she couldn’t leave at 10. She didn’t want to just say goodbye, but finally break it off. As he was packing up his sheet music, she had begun telling him she had bought the island, was going away, and he was surprised. But he was even more surprised when she told him he wouldn’t see her again.

            “You’ll be back, Babe, you’re my biggest fan.” He continued to shuffle his papers.

She didn’t push. And when he asked if she wanted to go back to Sausalito, she hadn’t the strength to say otherwise. Unlike her former boyfriend, who had joined the rank of friends, Bernard would never be among them. She hadn’t told him she had signed the document that would allow her to borrow enough to own the island. As if one could own trees, water, or air. Where did the beach end and the sea begin? Weren’t all islands connected, all land, as the Inismore to the Burren? If Mitzi owned Sandy Cay, how far did her domain extend? Someone drew lines on a map separating the British from the American Virgin Islands and each country conquered terrain outside its own circumference, and Mitzi had joined the club. Wealth bought wealth and if you belonged to a wealthy country you could borrow. But behind it all, she could steward the island’s ecology, protect the miniature lizard. She wouldn’t move there until she could afford to retire, but she could visit, enlist workmen from Tortola to work on the deteriorating structures and help restore the eco-system.

When she left Bernard sleeping, she left him a note that said she would take the early bus back home. She had all day to think about her island and she wanted to start as soon as possible. When she left had Inismore, looking back from the stern of the ferry to the surface on the horizon, she closed one eye and put her finger out on the dividing line between land and sky, between water and sky. She had walked into it unhampered, like she would walk onto Sandy Cay. She would need baggage for this stay, but after years she would need to bring nothing except a passport. She could be faceless. She had gone to Ireland after her former relationship dissolved, leaving a place she knew. But when she left the island, she realized that she had carried it with her all along, the mysteries of the forts content to remain theories.

What could she take with her now, what could she use in raw materials? And what would she lose among the ruins of the four buildings and tables, the palms and beaches? Returning to her houseboat in a few weeks she would arrive alone.

But when Mitzi had returned to her houseboat later that morning, it was gone. Everything was gone. The storm had wrecked havoc on everything from Washington State down to Los Angeles in the course of a day, as winds carried the mood of a hurricane from the north Pacific Ocean. A neighbor had rescued Tippo on his way out, and she found him at the makeshift shelter at the grade school’s gym in town. She could not approach the pier her houseboat was moored to because only one plank sufficed. Police had roped everything off, yet in the mid-morning half-light, she could see one man stretching himself from a shank of wood out to what remained of his houseboat, a boat without a house, sinking slowly into the now calm bay. The warm sunlight belied the night’s activity, and it seemed hard to believe.

            The light threw its path on the opening cut out of the brush again, a sundial coming around full swing.  She heard the woosh of a plane from the cracks in the palm leaves and the garble of an engine winding down, coming to a halt. A small shadow ran across the path, interrupting the smooth stream.

…without forests, these lizards will disappear…

            But if it was the size of her thumb, how could she see it? She must be imagining, it must be one of the sand-covered fish, making its way confusedly away from the shore, half covered in sand, half flesh. Shrugging off her sandals, she sprang up out of her chair and ran, being careful to not kick up any sand, on her way to the beginning of the path. Down on her hands and knees now, making her way into the foliage, her skirt ripped at the edge, just a slight tear. She quickly unbuttoned it at the top and slipped out of it, leaving it behind, and she continued to sift through the dense leaves and prickles, fine scratches appearing on her legs and arms.

            Making her way slowly past a group of large purple flowers, she slipped on a wide, scissor-shaped leaf and fell. Her hands, plunged into the black sand among the roots, felt moist. She wiped them off on her tank top and then pressed her forefinger to one of the larger scratches and licked the blood.

She sat down properly to catch her breath. She would go no farther today, even at a lizard’s pace. She had all the time to look. The little creature was the smallest species of reptile, bird, or mammal, smaller than the little bobbing shore birds that frequented the island, smaller than the mysterious elephant that once graced the Galapagos’ shores. Easily, its round body had slithered away, where she could not follow. But she knew it was there, waiting for her yet waiting for no one to discover it, as it made its home among the coarse sand trapped among the brush and palms.