Bunny and Shark (3 page)

“You piece of betraying fuck!” And you march naked and sweaty over to the fridge and take out all the food: bright pink pâté, a sausage peeled back from its white covering, murky pickles, and make a pile on the bastard's bed where you eat it like you're actually a sow, or some kind of animal ripping the food apart with your chipped nails, letting it all smear across your face and drip onto your exposed rolls. You make stains on the sheets. You indulge in rubbing it in.

Eat until you think you must be full. Though you don't feel it, your raw, empty heart racing is the only sensation. Brushing yourself off, you go up on deck, smoking another cigarette to have a proper look at who or what might be looking for you.

Day two dead

(In which rain rises up from the ocean and

washes the rage away.)

C
OCKSURE, RADIATING FILTH
. Tobacco on your nostril out-breaths. After a flash rainfall, as you lie on the deck with eyes closed, heat bears down on you through a crack in the clouds. You stay that way, leaned up against the front cabin window where you'd always sit with your 11 a.m. cocktail, and you revel in the post-tantrum energy. Of it being over now. The familiar aftermath qualities of thrill: of having won the argument and wrecked the house. Smashing expensive things just makes the point that everything is worthless to you anyway. Replaceable. Exchangeable. Except you won't let yourself be: you'll remake, reframe, get back to your beautiful self. Polish, style, adorn. Pull out your reliable charms.

In time, you smell smeared pâté cooking on your skin. It dawns on you, and you smile: the sun is sending you a message. You bake, you swell. You imagine this sun pouring life into you. How it is meant just for you. How it is telling you: you don't need to be dead. That you were subject to a miracle. Of always having received.

You picture the heel of your stiletto pushing the accelerator of your SAAB as you speed past the black boys on bikes to get to the Plaza Cavalia, the plaza at the centre of town, so much shinier than the real one in Italy. Then you picture the wad of clothes you arrived in slowly sinking to the bottom of the ocean. They hit the plankton soundlessly. You run your hands over your sweating naked body. It's on the fat side, sure, but your Bunny is still there pushing through the surface. Look how strong you are, how you swam all the way here. Look how your boobs are holding up. You don't look, you don't need to; you've memorized them from every angle in your bendy mirror room. Dammit if you don't see that Italian bedroom set again. No. Stop that Bunny. Make it new. Here you are, on the deck of your own sailboat, getting an all-over tan, pointing your breasts as close to the sun as possible. Hours like that, soaking in pretentious thoughts to keep other thoughts out, until the sky is nothing but a pane of glory pouring more and more of the island's richness onto you.

Anything, everything is still possible.

Then a second short rainfall breaks your tanning session and dampens your crystal message. Maybe you should hide out a little longer, find out what the bastard knows so far and what his next move might be. Figure out how to work your way back into the circle slowly. Do you come back entirely as yourself, or reinvented? Undecided, you do nothing much all day. You go back inside, tiptoe through the shards of glass, and plunk yourself back into the bastard's bed, in front of the TV with a bag of chips. From time to time you scan the cabin and notice you've done little more than piled new chaos onto the old. It is totally unrecognizable. You fall asleep feeling dolphin-worthy, safe at sea, voluptuous and exhausted.

Day three dead

(In which Her drifts away on a ribbon of

Scotch tape and Bunny makes a plan.)

D
RUGGED HAZE UPON WAKING
. You wade through it. First the sluggish smell of fish as they meander through the shallow waters, then this unsteady view of the horizon going up and down through a crack of door. Finally the memory that, in the night, you got hold of the bastard's sleeping pills.

The sailboat bobs softly in the water and you bring yourself onto your knees, fumbling as best you can through the broken glass and blankets that clutter the two beds; you rush from one side to the other looking through the portholes to search for someone searching for you. Could he already be inside? You jump to your feet to lock the door, and careen, off-balance. You smell the sharpness of cheap plastic having been snapped. Your body heaves like a stump of wood or something oversized that is at odds with the economical shapes and angles of the cabin space, and your numb limbs become some thick, dumb island that thuds to the floor. Your dolphin-Bunny power narrows itself to a shard, like the chip of glass you come eye to eye with as you lie there, the room now spinning out of sync with the dip and rise of the boat. You feel ill. You puke. And the reality of the stifling cabin, with all its new putrid smells of rot and smash-up, makes way for a fresh wave of paranoia.

Sticky and bloodied, prepared for deception, you stand, only to grab at furniture that rolls away on creaking metal wheels. The sea might be a trap, you think. There are so many ways the bastard could surround you. You think of how the food will run out. How flimsy the locks are. How they'd burn down your boat before you could lock them out.

Being burnt alive. Smashed to death against the cliff rocks. Devoured by sharks. Why glorify yourself when you know full well that if they find you now they'll simply shoot you dead?

Your brief handhold on a cabinet ledge sends your hip pivoting into an invisible, painful corner of something you miss seeing. Thankfully, somehow, you coincide with the bed, which you fall headlong into. You lie there breathing. You feel your blood soaking into the sheets. Rest now, and heal, Bunny. Nothing suspicious has been seen or heard today. “Pills, wear off, please, oh please,” you implore to yourself. What you need are ointments, some fizzy drink, and a clear head to think this through with.

But you sleep again. From some other lifetime you are sent a sensation. You dream: of weapons that are dusty, dripping red. There are horses. Your soldiers following earshot away. There is fierce inhuman growling. The sound of galloping, yes, you are riding through a northern climate at dawn. So far from the ocean. Your ride is on land, the hard, frosted kind with trees as bare and grey as your hands gripping the coarse mane as you move at ruinous speed. A battle scream breaks the still air. Axes fall thudding to ground. A woman, not you, cuts a line in front of you, she runs across the icy landscape in bare feet, in a white dress covered in a cross of blood. You know you have murdered her, that you can do it, that you did do it, that you are capable and ready for anything bloodthirsty raw.

Jeez, what kind of pagan shit was that? You sit up and feel clear. Your eye, an exploded range of yellows and deep blues, with an etched black opening that inspects your face with measured care, concludes the cuts aren't that bad at all. Compared to your dream, at least. You dab at them with outdated Polysporin.

In a drawer under the bed, your hand pushes past a sequined T-shirt and a tangle of pearls to find a one-piece Speedo bathing suit. You squeeze into it, stretching the elastic with your rolls. It's something you've never worn but have had in there forever. Once a bikini-only lady, how easily you stuff your mouth now, cramming in whatever food is at hand. You Band-Aid your cuts, then wind them and the rest of yourself in a sterile, waterproof tape, smoking a cigarette all the while. You put the pack with the lighter into a Ziploc bag, which you also tape to your back, crisscrossing your chest over and over, turning your body into one big holster to which you add Ziplocs of a small bottle of water, the pearls (why not?), some cash, and the only personal ID you find on-board: your NAUI Diver's Certification card. You can't quite rid yourself of this final proof that you are you. You giggle at the thought of yourself in that bikini you tossed aside, with your hair in its characteristic giant blonde poof hovering over your melon-perfect tits. All tied up now, you raise your arms up and down, stretch from side to side to test how well you stay in place, how those selfsame tits hold firm, feeling satisfied that nothing rips. You leap thunderously onto the step to avoid broken glass, then go up on deck and take one last look at the cabin disaster. Will the bastard connect this mess with you or his own debauchery?

You decide: he'll connect it to you. You who are supposed to be dead and mangled by sharks. Fucking bastard. So you go back down, pull on a pair of his cowboy boots and sweep all the glass and medical garbage and crumbs and change the sheets, and then stand back to survey the twin beds glowing in their satiny gold like two bar tops. His eyes will gravitate towards that tidiness, and remember. So you rip the covers off to look at the effect. Too much of a prison-scene fuck-you absence. He'll know. You remember that your bed was made, and his wasn't, so you redo the gold and tuck it all in, look one very last time and decide on a dozen other small shifts, this way and that, before everything looks just like any other drunken night spent on board by the bastard alone. Or with her.

Her. Banish that, Bunny, don't think of Her, don't formulate her face in your mind. You've never seen Her, but you've pictured Her endlessly and right now you can't let yourself fall apart from the quivering, perfect form that becomes her image. Instead, let the abstract, acidic awareness of Her curdle upward inside you. Ask instead the question, the question that is uniquely about the two of you, you and the bastard, about your love and devotion: why, after all these years of knowing each others' every move, why hasn't he sensed you might have lived? That you do live. Why hasn't he come back? Just to see?

Night now, in a peculiar splendour of Speedo and tape, you jump over the edge of your sailboat with a loud splash.

The water is dark and fresh, and the ribbons of tape descend with you in a shimmery flutter that rises again quickly and surrounds you. But the salt stings. Skin flaps up on several cuts freed from your twining efforts. You relish the smallness of those pains against the security of the other objects which stay put, as you start the generous pull of your strokes.

Your plan, clear and simple: to swim from empty sailboat to empty sailboat, to spend as many nights as you need until the real plan of how to live again on your island presents itself to you. You are sure it will.

The NAUI card: your weak link. You feel it scraping at your back now every time you move. Yet, you can't tear it off. It's the symbol you cannot let go of for fear that the bastard has already decided to erase every living trace of you.

Can a person be entirely erased?

The thief's dilemma. Or the migrant's. You have been a criminal, but you don't deserve such definitive, all-out exile.

And as you fall into a mute rhythm with the water, the only urgent goal is: swim as long as you can. The sea and salt will rub away who you are, leaving only the Bunny interior. That's all that will matter.

Scan the yellow lights each time you come up for air, and estimate the distances between the village lights and the shore lights, which are much closer, and then those of boats that spread out around you. But it's the boats that hide out, those without lights, the invisible ones that you need to bump up against, to climb aboard and disappear into.

Keep swimming. Feel as if by sonar: the circumference of the island, its salient boundaries: the tourist shores, the family-land beaches, the lowlands as they lead to the cliff where you got pushed. These are lesser known compared to the insides of the island, the hot, slick highways and main roads you've driven in your SAAB a hundred times over. The picture of yourself in your giant sunglasses, waving to acquaintances, is washed away, replaced by the image of your body become mammalian, shorn and buoyant, all pores reading every swish and shift of current.

Then a light on your left and voices, and you slink down low in the water. You float closer. Several people are on the deck of a white boat, clinking glasses, eating from a tray that flashes silver and smells of rich, ornamental food. You bow as low as possible into the water and pull in to touch the hull of the boat. You tread so gently there to listen, for ages it seems, but you don't hear a single word about you or your disappearance. Has the news not yet broke? Your shrivelled fingertips caress the fibreglass. Is that caviar? You are tempted to whisper to the man you sense is up there, just a few feet above you – Hey, I'm down here – and in your weakness, in that second, you imagine him hoisting your hefty body with all its baggy tape and Ziplocs up onto their pristine deck where you once belonged.

Thinking something is bubbling beside you, you notice the pearls have escaped their bag, they unfurl at your side like a jellyfish arm ballooning into a sudden whiteness. Then they are gone. You don't grab after them.

Instead you drift away from the sounds of their champagne, and the beach behind you recedes even further. You go underwater and enter a kind of sea-quiet state that blots out your cold body and your two bloated raisin hands until you come up against a wall that is dark like an impenetrable sky: too black to make sense of. Disoriented, not until the surface of the boat is at your nose do you realize that this hard, flat expanse is not part of the dark sea, or dark sky, but of Coke-Bottle's boat. And another party in full swing on deck.

/ / /

On the water, sounds and space get all mixed up. Whispers that belong on one shore are turned to roars on an alien shore. In the late afternoon when the sun is at its zenith, sights appear across a span of water as if all has been turned upside down. Like the Fata Morgana mirages. You remember how this phenomenon once brought all the passengers onto the cruise ship's penthouse decks (where you Playboyed it, dealing cards by night, and drinks by day). They'd raced to the prow, confusing the mirage with a sighting of land or a mountain that was just there, out on the horizon. They'd put their hands out to touch it. And marvelled for hours, while you pushed through them, shivering in your summer tux, carrying trays of Chardonnay and bottles of Crown Royal. Even then you'd never forget a face or a tab. Your brain kept everything tidy, catalogued.

Now these sea anomalies count you among them, placing you at the vortex of a series of strange forces: distant voices sounding like they are right there beside you, dolphins emerging to save you. Your life becomes a mermaid's.

Stories of disappearances and balls of fire appearing in the night air conflate in your mind with the sudden appearance of Coke-Bottle's vessel. It has always been parked not five metres from your own. Which means somehow you've been swimming for hours in circles, not towards the foreign vessels parked in the bayside, but blindly paddling back again to the sailboats of your gang. In this there seems to be order to the universe, even if mysterious, and you sigh with relief.

Did your head make a thud against the hull? You aren't sure. You will your dolphin-miracle to extend into the present: more and more, invisibility has become your armour. The gang must be too drunk to have seen you swimming along, and now you can silently ambush them. You bring yourself close to the descent of the black hull, cradling its curve, feel it sucking you under along its slippery surface. Coke-Bottle, right there out of uniform, holding a glass, telling a story to . . . Who is that? From this angle, you can't tell. Goddammit if you'll be caught out wearing this luggage and all shrunk up to look two decades older than you deserve! You've always lied so successfully about your age. No, this time you'll hang back and observe them, see what they know.

Out of habit, you run one bloated, piggy finger under each eye to wipe away smeared mascara. Then you remember you haven't had makeup on in days. Jeez, they'd likely not even recognize you. Their drunken laughter infuriates you and fuels the growing temptation to pull yourself up onto their ladder and unveil your dead self to them. Like the Ghost of Christmas Past. The really fucking frightening one. And scream at them. The bastard would fall over dead. Oh, no question he is there. And even as you think this, you hear his throaty cough. The sound makes you instantly picture his bald spot showing when he throws his head over his knees in the glee of his own horsey laughter. Just days after having killed you, the über-bastard.

Do you really have to hang tight? If you are dead then you should be able to do as you like. But the fucking trouble of it is your shivering, halted breath, your flesh getting heavier, a blank slab – all proof that you are in fact here, though thoroughly exhausted. The weakness of just barely hanging on. Unable to let yourself drift closer to their voices, to hold on to the ladder for a bit. To rest your head on a rung. You hear the din of men and women, their self-entitled fervour so familiar you can almost imagine their clothes, their hands chunky with rings holding the rails, their flirtations that can lead to blows that can lead to that kind of late-night brotherly love involving guns and hard drugs and someone peripheral getting eliminated. You chuckle silently at your exaggeration. It mostly is. Except when it happened that one time and you shut your mouth, for him, forever. It was part of your love-deal. The exquisite promise of it shivers through you, alerting you to your humanness and how this body was once cradled warmly in his arms. For a second you believe his love could be refreshed, that he might remember.