the mortis (2 page)

“
So that’s it?”

“
I’m sorry, sir,” she says. 

He shakes his head. 
“Okay.”  He checks her name tag.  “Yolanda.  Let me talk to someone else.”

The woman leaves through a door behind the counter, and two minutes later, another woman comes out.  Also Mirasai.  This woman is a manager, according to her name tag.  Rina, it says.

“I was told what happened,” says Rina.  “I’m sorry to hear it.” 

“
Which part?” he asks.

“
Pardon me?”

“
Which part are you sorry for.  Yolanda or the dead animals?”

The woman smiles, and it seems genuine. 
“Both, if I have to be,” she says.  “I hope they were not equally bad.”

Park
lets himself smile a little bit at that. 

“
Look.  This isn’t a big deal,” he says.  “I just want you to understand what I saw.”

The woman nods, and it doesn
’t feel scripted.  “I’m glad you came to tell us,” she says.  “We have had more fossa in the area recently.  You know about fossa?”

“
Yes,” he says.  To him, they look like a cross between panthers and wolverines.  “I know what they are.”

“
They are the cause of your dead animals,” Rina says.  “When they hunt together in packs, they circle the prey and then tighten the circle.  Everything in the center dies.”

He nods. 
“Very efficient.”

“
Don’t worry,” Rina says.  “They’re shy with people.  In all my time here, I’ve never heard of a human encounter.”

That evening, he and his wife eat dinner on the outdoor patio terrace of the Makoa restaurant.  Everything is
gorgeous; the atmosphere is exactly what the hotel website shows.  More stars visible overhead than he thought possible, coming from the city.  Glass-top bistro tables and cushioned armchairs and sectionals.  Kettle cauldrons with small wood fires.  A light wind in the palms.  One of the staff is playing some kind of Mirasai stringed instrument in the bar area.

This is their third time at the restaurant, and they
’ve had the same server, a young Mirasai man, each time.  He calls himself Melo. 

Melo recognizes them; he even calls them by name.  When they act surprised, he tells them that their faces are very memorable.  This
is a gentle type of codespeak—Park has heard it many times before.  It’s Melo’s way of saying: we don’t get a lot of black folks here at the Lavelha.

Park orders wild boar and Lee orders encrusted tilapia.  They share a bottle of red wine made from a vineyard on the southwest slopes of the islet, and it
’s terrible, but that doesn’t matter, not at all.  They drink so many toasts to each other that he loses track.  She’s laughing at everything he says. 

At the end of the meal, while they wait for Melo to bring the check, Park sees a man climb onto a table and stand, swaying drunkenly.  A grown damn man on a tabletop.  This isn
’t some fraternity pledge who’s had one too many; this is someone who should know better.

Park nods to Lee. 
“Look at this,” he says.

She turns around in her seat, watching the man.  She looks back at Park. 
“Can I borrow a dollar bill?” she asks.

Park smiles. 
“Only one?”

They try ignoring the situation, going back to their conversation, but soon the other diners start to cheer for the man, to egg him on.  Shouting out suggestions.  Take it off.  Dance. 

Park can see the restaurant staff assembling around the table where the man is standing.  Melo is part of the group.  Smiling, nodding, waving his hands, trying to calm the cheering crowd without implying that the party’s over.  The staff is used to these kinds of drunken displays by foreigners, you can tell.  All of them, without exception, are smiling broadly.  No judgment on their faces.  One of the servers, a Mirasai woman, is trying gently to talk the man down, smiling up at him like he’s famous. 

The man on the table seems to be the only one who isn
’t smiling.  His mouth is open wide, his eyes fixed forward.  Even from a distance, the red welts on his arms are visible, running from bicep to wrist. 

“
We should help them,” Lee says.

Park looks at her.  All of the lightness is gone; she
’s serious.  “Help who?” he asks.

“
The wait staff.”

He shakes his head. 
“Come on.  Help how,” he says.  “What am I supposed to do?  It’s not my place to jump in.”

“
I didn’t say you.”

“
All right,” he says.  “You then.  What the hell are you going to do to fix this?”

She doesn
’t answer.  She wipes her mouth with a napkin, slaps it down on the table, and starts to stand from the chair. 

“
Lee,” he says quietly.  “Lee.”

She pauses, half in and half out of the chair, staring at him.  He is about to apologize, to ask her to sit back down, but before he can speak, he notices movement over her shoulder.  He looks, and it
’s the man on the table.  The man has raised an arm up to the level of his face, and now he’s staring at it carefully.  All at once, the man places his wrist into his mouth and bites down hard enough to spill blood, and without warning, he plunges forward off of the table, teeth still clamped down.  He strikes the concrete of the patio face-first.  There is a sickening, wet smack sound, and the crowd collectively gasps. 

Before Lee can turn around, Park reaches over the table and takes her face tightly in both hands.  He keeps her focus forward, on him.

“Look at me,” he says.  “Don’t turn.”

She takes hold of his wrists and pulls, but he doesn
’t let go.  Her head is straining against his hands.  “What happened?” she asks.

“
The man fell.  It’s all right.”

“
Is he okay?”  Her eyes are wide.

“
Just look at me.  Everything is fine,” he says. 

“
Let go of me.” 

“
Lee.  This isn’t something you want to look at.”

“
Let go,” she says.  She is facing him because she has no choice, but her eyes are staring down at the table.

Park
sees that a crowd has gathered around the fallen man, blocking the view.  He lets go of her face. 

As she stares at him across the table, her eyes well up. 
“Goddammit, Park.  Don’t ever do that to me.” 

He stares at her. 

“Do what?” he says.  “Damn.  Did I hurt you?”

“
Don’t you ever hold me like that.”

“
Are you serious?  I was trying to help you, Lee.”

“
Don’t,” she says.  “It doesn’t help when you make my decisions for me.”

He shakes his head.  He picks up his glass and downs the last of the wine. 
“If you want to look, then look, Lee.  Decide.  Move as much as you goddamn want to move.”

At that moment, Melo comes over to their table.  The young man
’s hands are trembling.

“
You should go now,” Melo says. 

Park looks up at him.  The boy looks frightened. 
“We can’t,” Park says.  “We still need the check.”

“
I mean go from Torluna,” Melo says.  “Leave here.”

They return to their room—s
uite 504 of the Makoa.  With her back facing him, she takes off her dinner dress and changes into blue yoga pants and a tank top.  She brushes her teeth, washes her face, and ties on a headwrap.  She sits on the bedside and unzips a brown pouch with her sickle-cell medicines inside.   

Five tablets from five different bottles.  She swallows them all at once with water from a plastic hotel cup.

He watches.  “Is it bad?” he asks.  These are the first words he’s spoken since the restaurant.

She rubs her face. 
“I’m just being preventative.”

“
Can I help?”

“
No,” she says.  “I’m all right.”

Park doesn
’t say anything else.  Eventually he climbs into bed next to her, without touching, and as he lies in the dark, he remembers a time, early in their relationship—back when they felt they still had something to learn about each other—he looked up sickle-cell disease on an internet encyclopedia.  He chose to read about it because she suffered from it and he loved her, and part of loving her was understanding the ways in which she’d been damaged. 

The article said that a vaso-occlusive crisis is triggered by red blood cells that change spontaneously into a crescent shape.  Unyielding and hooked instead of malleable and round.  They have the wrong geometry to pass smoothly through the capillaries, and their edges dig into the boundary walls.  The cells pile up on themselves, ho
lding each other back—occluding everything.  Even to this day, he sometimes wonders why the body doesn’t understand how to dilate its own vessels.  To relax its engineering tolerances, to open itself, allowing its pathways to swell to dimensions greater than the established mean. 

The next morning, they decide to spend some time away from the hotel.  Make some new memories, something to crowd out the old. 

They go
to the tourist area surrounding Resort Lavelha.  The area doesn’t even have a name—it’s nothing but a handful of stores and a park with a fountain and a playground, no actual houses.  Its only purpose is to give hotel guests another place to buy keychains and t-shirts with tortoise logos and cups of frozen yogurt and bottles of red for the in-room refrigerator.  Lee calls it the Trap because it’s only for the tourists, like them.  

They go for ice cream.  Coconut and guava, dusted with ground lychee nuts and vanilla bean powder.  They walk together slowly on the cobblestone roads, spooning ice cream from cardboard cups.  They
’re on speaking terms again; as they move from store to store, they talk things out.  She offers an apology first, which allows him to offer his own, and soon after that, they’re laughing again.  She catches his hand on the downswing and takes hold.

They are leaving a jewelry shop when he catches sigh
t of a fossa on the sidewalk—black against the bleached concrete.  Standing motionless in front of a shuttle-stop bench across the road, around thirty yards from them.  It seems to be looking into a nearby treeline.

He points out the fossa to Lee.  As she stares, she begins to lecture, telling him the reasons why the presence of the animal shouldn
’t really be all that surprising to anyone.  We are in its territory, she says.  This whole area is built in the middle of a natural habitat—of course the wildlife is going to be visible.

Park smiles
at his wife; she is always thinking, always deconstructing the prevailing ideologies.  Choosing her words, her lines, with good care.  He tells her that she should just stare open-mouthed and say Wow like everyone else, and his words, his own lines, make her smile.  It’s a blessed thing to see. 

Park scans the crowd of onlookers.  Most are taking pictures of the animal, and some of them are trying to fit themselves in the frame without getting too close.  As he watches, a woman in a floral-print dress drops her camera mid-snap, and he expects her to bend down and retrieve it, but she doesn
’t.  Her arms fall to her sides.  She stares intently, almost dazedly, at the fossa. 

Abruptly, she begins to break away from the crowd, moving toward the animal.  Paying no mind to her surroundings.  Staring straight ahead.  As she plows through the group of onlookers, she makes contact with a small child, a girl, and the girl falls.  A man, the father most likely, starts cursing the woman.  A flow of profanity.  She doesn
’t seem to hear; she doesn’t seem to notice anything but the fossa.

The woman pushes o
n until she clears the crowd, and as she enters open space, trudging across the cobblestone road, the fossa shifts its focus to her.  Its tail begins to thrash.  Some onlookers are shouting at the woman to stop, to turn around.  A man yells out that she’s a stupid crazy bitch.

Park f
eels Lee let go of his hand, and before he can speak a word, she is gone, sprinting toward the woman.  Crossing the road, closing the distance.  He can hear her voice as she screams out to the woman, but he can’t make out what she’s saying. 

The woman doesn
’t show any sign of hearing a goddamn thing; she continues plodding forward, mouth open.  Before Lee can reach her, the fossa reacts.  It lunges, striking the woman at belly level, bringing her down, and immediately begins tearing at her body.  Without warning, at least five more fossa burst from the treeline, bolt across the street and join in. 

There
’s nothing to be done for the woman, short of dialing the hotel.  Park and Lee retreat into a t-shirt shop located far up the road and wait for at least half an hour, until several men carrying machetes and rifles come.  Marching past the front display window, looking like a band of ragged vigilantes.  All Mirasai, all wearing Lavelha coveralls.  They’re members of the hotel gardening crew, more than likely, recruited for this unenviable cleanup task.

Park opens the shop door to the outside and leans out, calling to the group of men. 

They stop walking and turn.  The tallest of them calls out a return greeting, and Park leaves the shop entryway and goes to stand with him.  The stitching on his coveralls reads Angelo.  Angelo asks Park about what happened.

“
It’s what I said on the phone,” Park says.  “They didn’t tell you?”

“
I want to hear again,” says Angelo.

Park looks at him, then at the other men. 
“Is this everyone?”

“
Everyone what,” Angelo asks.

“
Everyone that’s coming.  Don’t you have some kind of ambulance or medical team or something?”

Angelo stares. 
“Is the
galashao
dead or not dead?” he asks.

“
I don’t know what that is.” 

“
Galashao
.  The foreigner.  She is passed on, yes?”

Park shrugs but then reluctantly nods.  He didn
’t stay to watch the end, but he can’t imagine a possible scenario in which the woman survived.

“
The ambulance is in Cãlo,” Angelo says.  “Fifty miles.  Why come now if the woman is dead?”

Park doesn
’t respond to that.  What can possibly be said?

“
So tell what happen,” Angelo says.  “Again, so we know the information of it.”

Park nods. 
“A woman got attacked out of nowhere.  The fossa came.”

“
How many fossa?”

Park shakes his head. 
“Around five or six.  I’m not sure.”

One of the smaller men says something in Mirasai and another man responds, and soon the group lapses into an internal discussion. 

When they finish, Angelo looks at Park.  “How did they come,” Angelo asks.

Park isn
’t sure what the man is getting at.  “What do you mean, how?”

“
I mean how they do it?  The hunt of the woman happens how,” he says.

Park shrugs. 
“I don’t know.  It started out as one, and then the rest came after that.  After the woman went down.”

When the men hear this, they start up another discussion in Mirasai.  It gets heated this time.  The expressions on the men
’s faces aren’t as confident as they used to be.

After a few minutes, Angelo addresses Park again. 
“What did the woman do?” Angelo asks.

“
Nothing.  She just went down,” Park says, shrugging.  “No fight, no struggle, nothing.  It’s like she wanted to be taken.”

“
She run first?”

Park shakes his head. 
“That’s what I’m saying.  She didn’t even try.  She walked right into it.”

Angelo turns from Park and speaks to the men.  As he speaks, the men glance at Park once in a while but quickly look away. 

When Angelo finishes speaking, the men shoulder their weapons, and without a word, they begin walking back the way they came.  Angelo joins them.  Park stands in the roadway, yelling at their backs.  So that’s it?  You’re just going to take off and leave us here? 

Park collects Lee from the shop, and together they walk their way out of th
e Trap.  Her eyes are vacant; there are dark circles carved underneath.  She doesn’t speak a word on the way back to the hotel. 

When they enter the front lobby, Lee heads directly for the elevators while Park storms up to the front desk.  There are people in line ahead of him, but he doesn
’t give a damn.  Yolanda is at the counter, stupidly staring. 

She tries to speak, but he cuts her off. 
“I need the manager,” Park says. 

Rina, the same manager as before, emerges from the back room after a few minutes
’ time.   

Park doesn
’t wait for her to start.

“
Rina, right?  I’m pissed off, Rina,” he says.  “I need to tell you, up front, that I’m goddamn not happy.”

She nods.  Her face is haggard.  It looks as though she hasn
’t slept at all.

“
Do you know what I just saw?” he asks.

“
Yes.”

“
Hell, not only me.  My wife.”  His voice is rising.  “There were children watching.”

“
I’m so sorry.”

“
And after it’s all over, who do you send,” he says.  “Some goddamn gardeners.”

“
I didn’t know.  It wasn’t my decision.”

“
Some gardeners?  That’s who you send out?”

“
We are extremely short-staffed right now.  I’m very sorry.”

Park shakes his head. 
“And not only do you send some gardeners—some goddamn gardeners—but they don’t even do anything helpful.  They just turn around and leave.”

She stares at him. 
“They left to where?”

“
Hell if I know.  They just took off.”

Rina doesn
’t say anything in response.  She unclips a two-way radio from her belt, presses the signal button, and speaks in Mirasai.  A voice responds, there is some back and forth between them, and before long they’re having a full-blown conversation.  It gets heated at times; he can’t tell what they’re talking about, but the tone says it all.  Park stands by and waits while they finish the exchange, but after around a minute, he remembers the people in line behind him.

Park turns.  A man, woman, and two young boys are standing together between the guide ropes.  A family. 

“I’m sorry.  I know you were ahead of me,” Park says, directing it to the man.

There
’s no response.  No sign that any of them even register his existence.  No words, no eye contact, nothing.  All four family members are just staring off, each in a different direction.

Park isn
’t sure what to do, so he goes on.  “There was an incident, a serious one.  I’m just trying to figure everything out.”  He gestures behind him, toward Rina.  Then he waits, giving the four of them a moment to respond, to acknowledge him in any way, but they don’t.  Nothing changes.

After a few moments, Rina says,
“Sir,” and Park turns back to the counter.

Now that her conversation on the two-way has ended,
Rina looks more than just haggard; she looks deeply shaken. 

“
Again, I’m sorry,” she says.  “This won’t change what happened.  But I want you to know that the decision was made to let them go.”  As she finishes speaking, she re-clips the radio to her belt.

“
Let who go?” he asks.

“
The workers from Landscaping,” she says.  “They are no longer employed here.” 

When Rina finishes her sentence, the radio squawks.  Without looking, she reaches down and dials a knob until the sound cuts off.  

Park hesitates.  As pissed-off as he feels, this isn’t the outcome he was angling for. 

“
Look,” he says.  “I don’t like what they did.  Coming and going like that, doing not a thing to help the situation.  But I wasn’t trying to get anybody fired for it.”

Rina shrugs. 
“That’s very kind.  But these men did the wrong thing.”

“
By leaving?  You sacked them because they left?”

“
No.”

“
Hell, I might have done the same thing in their position.”

She shakes her head. 
“No,” she says.  “It’s not because they left—it’s because of where they went.  They didn’t return here, to the hotel.  They tucked tail and ran home.  Back to Cãlo.”

For the next ten minutes, he pushes Rina for some form of compensation—hotel freebies—to make up for the troubles.  Why the hell not?  Might as well come away with something positive out of all this. 

Rina gives him everything he wants, and then some.  A credit for two hundred dollars at the hotel restaurant, and another for the gift shop beside the lobby.  A discounted room rate for their entire stay.  Two free massages at the SpaClub.  By the end, Park is feeling pretty good about himself.  She even offers to waive the registration fees for a couples-only Mirasai cooking class tomorrow. 

Park looks at her. 
“You want me to make my own food,” he says.  “In a classroom.  On an island.  During my vacation.”

Rina smiles. 
“Think of it as a broadening activity,” she says.  “Trust me.  It’s fun.”

He scans the brochure she gave him.  The title at the top reads For Those Who Can Stand the Heat and Who Are Ready to Jump into the Fire.