Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (17 page)

W
ould my preoccupation with Emma seem more sensible to you, less melodramatic, if the way in which she became absent from me was something more than my inconstancy and her decision not to abide it? Would my grief carry more weight, and would you share in it, if rather than being separated merely by our mistakes, Emma and I were instead separated by the Styx? If she had, for example, died in a plane crash on her way to the island? And if it
would
carry more weight—if you
would
share in it—then why? Why is grief, when inspired by certain types of loss, considered something to surmount, to get over, while when inspired by other types of loss it's given a pass, allowed and even encouraged to go on forever?

M
y mother's grief, incidentally, seems like it will be forever acute. She sleeps three hours a night, and still wears my father's wedding band on a necklace. She cries while waiting at railroad crossings, or in line at the pharmacy. It's been four years.

I
t was a night like any other. Emma had been on the island nearly a month. I took her to dinner at the resort. We sat on the deck in a warm northern breeze and traded bites of our dinners and made fun of tourists and went back to the casita and fell into bed. When she climbed on top of me she moved slowly and moaned and whispered that it was better than it ever had been with anyone else, and she punched my chest while I grabbed her by the throat and squeezed, pinched and twisted the flesh on her hips, and all was perfect, there in that moment.

To this day I have no idea why I decided, on that early morning, to tell her about Charlotte.

Emma stood nude at the side of the bed, cutting the air with her hands as she unloaded her grief. Her eyes burned with a wrath I knew and recognized and, yes, I will admit, feared. No doubt she had learned this wrath from her mother—it shimmered too violently in the pools of her irises, was too impervious to reason, to have come from anywhere else—but whether it was transmitted to her by the womb or by the fist is a mystery that, like Emma herself, will never be solved.

Everything is wrong, she said. In the semi-dark the skin of her bare breasts shone pale against the tan on her shoulders, her upper arms, her belly. Nothing ever lasts, she said. Nothing works. I try to believe it will but look at the fucking evidence. Matty and I were in love once. I know we were. Look at us now. Look at my
life
! I lost everything, Ron. Everything. How can I trust this, now? You and me? How can I trust my own judgment? I trusted my judgment before, and here is my reward. Choices, Ron. These things did not just happen to me. I made choices that created these circumstances. How do I account for that, and still trust myself? I can't. My instincts—everyone's instincts, Matty's, yours, my mother's—our instincts, the basis for all our choices, are fucked. Therefore, our choices will be fucked.

I wanted to reassure her, tell her she was mistaken. I knew it was my responsibility, knew that everything between us going forward depended on my ability to convince her that she was mistaken. But then I thought of my own choices—thought of Charlotte—and remained silent.

And now Emma, who stalked happiness so keenly, said: I want to be away from everyone. From you. I want to crawl away and be alone. Like a fucking dying animal. She brushed tears from her cheek with a violent swipe of one hand. I hate it. But that's what I want.

H
ere's the thing: she was constant, and I was not. She was absent, yes, and she asked me to go away for a while, but only so she could construct a better version of herself to present to me. But I saw what I needed to see to make my victim narrative real: a selfish, insensate woman who cared only for her own feelings, insofar as she had any. I realize now, of course, how wrong I was. Because while she tried to prepare herself, I pulled away by increments. She was constant, and I was not. And that, ultimately, was all that mattered.

I am so reasonable now, so understanding. I see so very, very clearly. All of this is true.

T
he next morning I pulled on a decent pair of jeans and the one button-down shirt I had, and stayed sober all day, filled with a creeping dread of the empty space Emma would leave in her wake, and in the afternoon I brought her to the airstrip and sat beside her as we watched Cessnas and de Havillands alight on the ground like giant aluminum dragonflies.

Then her plane arrived. We stood, both of us stiff and eager in the way I imagine a man about to be hanged would be stiff and eager. She had a messenger bag slung across her chest, which made it difficult to hug her properly. We shared a brief, awkward embrace, and kissed each other once, lightly, and she told me that she was sorry, and I told her the same thing though I wasn't sure about the particulars of what we were apologizing for; all that seemed certain was there was definitely something to be sorry about. Then she walked out to the tarmac and climbed aboard, ducking her head on the way in so that her hair fell forward and obscured what I believed then would be the last glimpse I'd have of her face, because already I was thinking, see, plotting, and the engines coughed to life and the plane made a short taxi past the little terminal, then turned and whisked by again in the opposite direction, and the pilot banked left the moment the wheels left the ground, drawing a sharp parabola back toward the mainland, taking Emma away to a place where she could be alone, like a dying animal, as she wished.

I
'd like to pretend it was a selfless act, but I can't, because I don't believe there's any such thing. And understand I say that not out of some easy, obvious cynicism, but simply because it seems to me that all motivation is internal, no matter how philanthropic or otherwise outwardly directed the act it inspires. The impetus never comes from outside of us. Therefore, by definition, every act is selfish.

All the same, my reasoning when I drove the Jeep off Mosquito Pier was to ease Emma's burden the only way I knew how. I couldn't do anything about her mother, or the cold, sooty remains of her marriage, or the fact that she was in her midthirties and childless and worried to the point of panic, sometimes, that she would share her mother's fate and go insane and grow old alone. I had tried to help with all of those things, and failed. I could, however, do something about the supplement of pressure and sadness I'd brought to her in the guise of love, like a cake laced with arsenic.

But if I'm being honest, that wasn't all of it, and even if I tried to pretend it was, you surely and rightly would not believe me. There is no such thing as a selfless act.

Because I wanted out. For my own sake, my own reasons. One can only have so many fantasies about crashing airplanes into the jungle or leaping in front of trains before one finally takes that tiny step across the threshold between fantasy and reality. And listen, I grappled with these urges when all was well. They came unbidden, even while I had a smile on my face. So imagine their insistence when I was contractually obligated to write a novel, but couldn't find either the motivation or the acumen to finish a grocery list. When I had a detective waiting to ask me questions at home, and my state of mind and relative drunkenness were such that I'd begun to suspect he might actually have reason to be interested in me. When I had become, in Emma's estimation, just another poor choice among thirty-five years' worth of poor choices.

I'm not expecting empathy. Wouldn't want it, in fact, if someone were to offer. Just trying to give you an idea of why I committed an honest and sincere act meant to draw the curtain down, an act that instead set in motion a helix of increasingly bizarre circumstances that bring us right to this very moment, with me trying, and probably failing by increments, to explain everything to you.

As Emma had said, so sage, so beautiful in her sadness and fury: when our instincts are fucked, our choices can't be anything but.

T
he plan, if it can be called that, was neither very detailed nor complex for all the time I spent thinking about it. The idea itself seems, in retrospect, to have stemmed from the day I parked the Jeep at the beach and sat there for hours thinking about driving into the ocean.

Mosquito Pier, on the island's north side, was straight and true and over a mile long, provided a veritable runway for launching myself at high speed into the water where the Atlantic met the Caribbean. Built by the Navy during WWII, these days it was abandoned except for the occasional tarpon fisherman or dog-walking gringo, but all the same, not wanting to be dragged sputtering out of the surf by a strong-swimming Samaritan, I drove there early in the morning, when even wayward local teens would have finished their six packs of Medalla and slunk home to bed.

When I arrived the pier was dark as crude oil and, as I'd hoped, deserted.

I sat with the engine idling at the spot where the pier met the island. The decision to actually hit the gas, when the time came, was surprisingly easy, almost matter-of-fact. I depressed the pedal steadily, gaining speed until the moist night air roared through the windows and around the cabin. The headlights illuminated cracked pavement, then gobbled it up in an instant. Dark shapes flashed by on either side of me. Overhead the galaxy shimmered with great good cheer: stars winked, a flip sliver of moon shone happily.

There was a lot of noise, I remember that. The wind. The throaty whir of the Jeep's old engine, stupid, reliable machine. The tires snapping over chunks of broken asphalt. The Dopplered chirrup of a thousand coqui frogs. The ocean, inhaling and exhaling at steady intervals. The splintering crack as the Jeep burst through the wooden guardrail at the pier's terminus.

And then: silence, airborne.

This silence persisted, even after the Jeep's grill hit the waves and my face bounced off the steering wheel. Viewed through the suddenly bloody lens of my sight, the last moments of my life were like a television set to mute. Black water flooded the cabin silently, soaking my pants, then the bottom of my T-shirt. As the water rose I felt my breath coming quicker, but could not hear it. I'm sure I moaned once or twice, but that sound failed to register, too.

But my hearing returned, somehow, once the water enveloped me fully: the womb-noises I'd noted the night I went swimming with Rick and Charlotte. A hush that was somehow full of distended, elongated, peaceful sounds.

I felt the water lift me gently out of the driver's seat.

Then I drifted. Both figuratively and, it would turn out, literally.

R
ay Kurzweil has pinned his hopes for resurrecting his father on what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns. He argues that technological progress occurs exponentially, rather than linearly as most people believe. In other words, computing power does not accrue in increments, like forming a snowball and then adding bits of snow to it one at a time. It's more like the proverbial snowball running downhill—it gains size and speed exponentially. It does not add; it multiplies.

This is why Kurzweil believes we will see the Singularity within the next fifty years, rather than at some hazy future time so distant as to remain comfortably fictional in people's minds. This is why Kurzweil eats very few carbohydrates, and takes 150 different health supplements each day. This is why he drinks vats of green tea and alkaline water, and gives himself IV treatments with chemical cocktails. Because he wants to make it long enough to see the Singularity, after which he, and everyone else, will live forever—or at least until the universe spreads itself so thinly across space that it becomes impossible to exist here anymore.

T
he time between when I drifted up out of the car seat and when I came to on what I'd later realize was Green Beach is an absolute inkblot, a cognitive black hole. No recollection whatsoever, although one has to wonder if perhaps I was swimming in a sort of blackout, as it seems unlikely that I would have survived if I'd been completely unconscious, just limp and drifting.

Emma told me, from time to time, that I talked in the middle of the night. Apparently I would say something to wake her, and we would have whole conversations, and then she would realize at a certain point that though my eyes were open and my mouth formed words, I was actually still asleep. It spooked her.

In any event, it doesn't take a tremendous imaginative leap to figure out how I ended up on Green Beach. I mentioned that the spot where I drove into the water off Mosquito Pier happens to be the convergence of the Atlantic and Caribbean. And you have to understand that these are not separate bodies of water in name only. Most days, standing on the pier, you can easily distinguish where one ends and the other begins—a sharp line dividing deep Atlantic blue from warm Caribbean aquamarine.

I'm not trying to bore you with minutiae. The point is that the Caribbean current runs in a whip from that spot, away from its communion with the Atlantic and around the western tip of the island—precisely the route one would take to get to Green Beach.

So the water lifted me up and out of the Jeep, then carried me around that western point, where the inbound swells pulled me ashore and deposited me on Green Beach—the most remote place on a remote island, a beach unoccupied for weeks at a time in the winter.

I woke half-interred in wet sand, with two things competing for the bulk of my attention: a face that felt shattered, and the most powerful thirst I had ever experienced, a Saharan thirst, the sort of primal dryness one imagines the Israelites hunkered down with after Yahweh told them they'd be sticking around the desert for another forty years.

I would come to understand that my face wasn't shattered; just my nose. And I would come to understand that I'd been on the beach, unconscious, for more than a day, thus explaining my thirst.

At this point I'd actually forgotten about the suicide attempt, and as I struggled to my feet, my skin like an undersized glove from dehydration and sunburn, my thoughts were consumed entirely with the need for water. I almost drank from the Caribbean, such was my desperation and confusion. But then I squeezed my eyes closed for a moment, making an effort to gather myself, and when I opened them again I turned and saw the jungle and realized where I was.

And then realized, immediately after, what I had to do to get out of there.

Waiting for someone to show up, at that time of year, was no good. In the summer, boats from the main island weighed anchor off Green Beach every day, but as I said, this was winter, and I could have been sitting there for days. So, dehydrated to the point of delirium, concussed and horribly sunburned, I staggered off into the jungle. It made as much sense as anything else.

Several hours later I came to the laguna, where once, on a happier day, I'd gone fly-fishing. I drank deep from the muddy, brackish water, tasting shit and swallowing small fauna and not caring at all.

From there it was easy to find my way to the main road. By and by I was able to flag down a
público
driver who, after a long dubious look and some questions in Spanish regarding what had happened to me and whether I wanted to go to
la emergencia,
agreed to drive me back to town. I thought I would have to negotiate an IOU, but then found a waterlogged twenty in my hip pocket. I gave it to him, told him to keep the change.

Inside I drank bottled water until I vomited, then drank some more. I took a cold shower and fell into bed. Some time later I got up long enough to loose a meager stream of what looked like Coca-Cola into the toilet.

When I woke the second time it was dark, and I decided I felt good enough for a drink.