Swimming in the Volcano (5 page)

Initially Mitchell had been wary of Isaac's queer habit, this dick chatter that was close to shamanism, an alien form of eccentricity that he couldn't accept with any seriousness.

“It's the wackiest thing I've ever heard,” Mitchell had declared the first month on St. Catherine, when Saconi's girlfriend Sally tried to explain Isaac's preoccupation with genitalia—his own and everybody else's.

“Well, you don't understand,” she had retorted with a passion that caused her to jerk. “Isaac's one of the few souls on this anchored melodrama who has made peace with the past. He accepts what's there, puts it behind him, and goes on. You might think that's simple but it's exactly the opposite. He just doesn't have a big problem with history ... not like some people I know,” she added, shifting her eyes in Saconi's direction. He was across the room at the kitchen table strumming his guitar, his eyes half-lidded, not interested in their game of backgammon.

Mitchell was still cynical. “It's all an elaborate euphemism for a style of masturbation,” he pontificated, “and a ruse to heat up the ladies.”

“You just don't understand, man,” Big Sally insisted. “For a Catherinian, Isaac is a man of the future.”

The public water always tasted stale, disflavored with brackishness. It had a not-quite-transparent look to it, as if it had been filtered through moldy bread crusts, and it harbored flecks and types of mote-sized growth. Mitchell swallowed some accidentally as he rinsed his mouth but forced it back up before the microbes could celebrate a new host. He had suffered bouts of dysentery off and on the first six weeks, planning his movements around the availability of a toilet. Isaac meanwhile had hung up the hotline to his ghosts, buttoned his trousers back in place, flexing his shoulders. Since the
world had not been made right it was his duty to make himself right for the world.

There was no mirror in the room, which was a blessing in the aftermath of a night of alcohol and a morning of injury and fear. A metal paper towel dispenser hung crooked on the wall, empty, but its chromed surface allowed a blurry reflection pocked by an archipelago of brown oxidation. Mitchell combed his sun-bleached hair with his fingers and examined the tumescent smear of his nose, broken again, he knew from experience. Leprous blotches of rust scarred his cheeks and forehead yet the radiance of his health could not be obscured. He was as robust as a sailor and he knew it, knew, for what it was worth, that for the first time in his adult life he had passed some physical frontier within himself and his appearance was markedly different than it had been before he left the States. What might Johnnie say after such a long hiatus, looking upon this transformation? You look swell, Mitchell, I had no idea you were going to grow up into a man, I guess I should have stuck around? He caught himself lingering over the dispenser in a mild narcissistic crush and jumped away. Not Johnnie alone was coming for a visit, but an unwanted accomplice—she was bringing his adolescence with her.

As Mitchell turned in circles looking for something to dry himself on, Isaac took his place, positioning himself in front of the useless fixture to rummage through the depths of his hair for remnants of Ooah Mountain. His fingers probed what was ordinarily a neat helmet of stubby coils that resembled six-inch sections of hemp rope, like a clown's wig, the tips orange from sea-bathing, protruding from his scalp. Their wild ride in
Miss Defy
though had tangled everything up, a composition that made Mitchell think of cheap, wind-torn macramé, something that Johnnie, bearer of ill-chosen gifts, might have disappointed him with on a Christmas past. Mitchell started to wipe his hands on his shirt but stopped, repulsed by its filthy, stained condition, and decided to get rid of it. Life on St. Catherine required the daily challenge of mundane improvisation. Everyone but the richest seemed circumscribed by a life-style of scouting, foraging, camping out, wiping backsides with banana leaves, newspaper.

No sooner had he removed his shirt than the door to the bathroom inched open and in tottered one of the legion of dispossessed, a fuzz-headed elder in mud-caked laceless shoes, decomposing pants with a purply sheen like the casing of a fly, a frayed nylon cord belt cinched above his imperceptible hips, an undertaker's black frock coat hanging like old drapery off his shoulders, a piece of clothing that must have been distributed by one of the churches on the island
long ago. The abandoned wardrobe of a far-off community. Three quarters of the populated planet existed on what the remaining quarter threw into the trash. Five-gallon plastic buckets, ideal for toting water; deformed bicycles, ideal transportation; the last war's guns, no longer fashionable but still fine for spreading influence—there was no telling what an intrepid scavenger might resurrect from the junkbin of affluence, including, for the trained eye, the dross of once-valuable ideas. The bin was full of tossed-away ideologies, remaindered polemics: determining which ideas had mileage left on them was an acquired skill for the scavenging elite. But the man who approached Mitchell in the bathroom was not to be counted among them. He clearly was of the lowest sort, a human form of flypaper or spider-web, a disciple of passive acquisition and thus a perfect candidate for meaningless charity.

Mitchell gave him his shirt.

Full of apprehension, Mitchell watched this cotton-headed fossil make a beeline for him, sliding his clunker shoes along the rough concrete floor. His right hand ascended with quivering effort, the glossy, weathered palm extended with mendacious authority. A feeling of susceptibility heightened until Mitchell was conscious only of being stripped and exposed, of being subtracted from himself, of nakedness, of naked immobilizing whiteness. The air resonated with the strain of the man's breathing, the drag of his shoes. There was no undershirt beneath the coat, only a bare sepia chest white-capped by curlets of stiff hair, a bonescape of ribs like a series of stalled waves threatening to collapse into the recess of his abdomen, wild currents of muscle running under his loose skin to tie the body together. Through the yellowed ruff of beard, the lips of the man pursed with an incomprehensible verdict, a mouth shaped not by hunger but by an indifference to it. His trajectory toward Mitchell seemed fixed, prearranged, and as Mitchell looked into his watery eyes and down at the arthritic cup of his fingers, he felt blinded by the disgusting surge of pity, the unknown and unknowable interiors that the old man confronted him with. Knowing how absurd it was to do this, Mitchell gave him the shirt and again with a practiced sense of movement, the old man clutched it, offering no change of expression, and headed back out, inscrutably satisfied. The spell he had created would not dissolve until Isaac, who had monitored the incident with a severe patience, spoke a gentle command.

“Move on, grahnpoppi,” he said, following after him. “Move on. Give back de shurt.” He laid a hand on the old man's shoulder.

The thought of having the shirt returned confused Mitchell, made
him unhappy. “Let him have it,” he said. “If he wants it he can have it. I can't wear it anymore.”

Isaac looked at Mitchell with disapproval but finally shrugged, taking his hand away; the old man released like a wound-up toy. Mitchell felt like he had become someone who needed to be protected from his own caprice. This was sublime ridiculousness, to give away a blood-soiled shirt to a walking corpse. A stick of animated carrion. Hang a shirt on decrepitude and nothing whatsoever in the world changed.

The old man disappeared out the door, a zombie come and gone. Mitchell dismissed a moment of petty guilt—why not give him a few coins if you were going to give him anything. Throw a dollar down the fathomless hole, into a need so pure it had no earthly solution, abstracting into the untouchable. You could talk about it but you couldn't change it, any more than you could fill a bottle with oil that had already been filled with water. But then, to do something so meaningless and farcical as give him a rag of a shirt, take it right off your back?

“What was that, man? Obeah?” He counterfeited a laugh. “That old man had some kind of hold on me. You know?”

“Nah,” Isaac said. “Him just a poor dutty mahn wit he hand put out.” Now that Isaac had washed his ear, Mitchell could see that it might need stitching. He asked again if Isaac were all right. “Not so good,” Isaac had to admit. “Daht ride knock some language in me ear I nevah esperience. Like ten womens whistlin and clickin tongue.” Mitchell wouldn't acknowledge this connection with yet another world. Access to one was more than enough for anybody. They were at the door and Isaac swung it open: an acrid stink seeped in behind the throb of Mitchell's nose.

“What smells funny?”

Isaac sniffed around, testing the air for himself. “Smell like some dy-amn religion buhnin gungee stick,” he said.

The souvenir stall had raised its grated door, doggedly anticipating customers, the collection of foreign currency. Incoming flights were customarily late; newcomers disembarked frazzled, wary, and discomposed. Some first-timers were doomed from the start, as if they were traveling under the weight of anesthesia—the couples from Liberty, Missouri, from York, Pennsylvania, from Coos Bay, Oregon, on an unmeditated leap out onto the globe, victims of Fireman's Ball raffles and travel agents that never should have been listened to, excursion packages and the defensive lies of their friends who went to some of
these places aboard a cruise liner and adored it. Dwayne and Jean, Bill and Helen, about to step off into the five most appalling days of their lives, on vacation in the Third World.

Mitchell walked under the grating sheepishly, aware of the impropriety of his shirtlessness. The people of St. Catherine expected their guests to honor a code of respectability. The code was straightforward and universally known, not unlike the standard Mitchell was raised by in Virginia: a sound appearance is a great comfort to everyone's nerves, particularly when among scoundrels. A tastefully dressed crook with a shine to his wing tips, a pederast who drives to the Fairfax Hunt in a Jaguar and spreads an eighteenth-century carpet on the lawn for lunch at the rail—these were citizens one could depend on not to disturb the public peace, wholly preferable to a state's attorney who purchased suits off the rack at Woodies and licked gravy from his butter knife. Whatever backroom tendencies you pursued which might bring shame down upon your house and loved ones, appoint yourself handsomely with the proper weaves, exude a delicate fragrance, make reference to your forefathers and investment strategies, stay out of the penitentiary and let heaven be your judge since nobody on earth was qualified for the position. The manners of the Virginia countryside, whether you were born under their influence or not, sugared the surface of human affairs in a land with few bridges between those who had access to the Almighty's benevolence and those who could not be considered chosen except by the heel of the Almighty's boot. The code was in fact a colonial vestige, which is why Mitchell found it so easily recognizable in St. Catherine, and obeyed its arcane formalities. In the puddle of island society, he had a professional reputation to sponsor, no matter how young and green he was, and without his consent or conscious complicity, a racial illusion to uphold. Despite his desire to subvert this mentality, he was made to understand that white men, who supposedly had the world in their pocket, were expected to look as if they deserved it. Bad packaging just upset needlessly; it was interpreted as flaunting, or mockery, or parody, and oppressed peoples had a volatile sensitivity in its presence, as if any sign of slackness or weakness were an incitement. Who could say how much law and order had been eroded by soup stains, a careless buttoning, an inept shave. It reminded him of nothing so much as the social diplomacies and trivial appraisals of family reunions, and of schooldays.

The demands of his office were not as staggering to the spirit, though he was still assigned an image to pantomime through: to perform as the answer man, the specialist from the North, rattle off stats
like baseball esoterica, confirm the intelligence of people already in place so they could get some respect, perhaps, from their own. Finally, not to dishonor the managerial class by looking like anybody could crash its party. At least at the ministry you accomplished something, if only an honest intention; the womb that expelled you and the soil you landed on were no longer considered trump, as everyone tried their very best to be modern.

Violation or not, he wasn't going to make Johnnie edgy walking around like Tarzan. The clerk inside the cramped souvenir shop, a woman with black harlequin spectacles, her hair tortured straight and shellacked into a rain-forest look, made no attempt to conceal the affront of his nakedness upon the harmony of her morning. She suffered such a low class of customer unwillingly, offering not service but an arctic freeze. The tee shirts Mitchell fingered through were all size Small and he was afraid to ask her if there were any others in stock. She thrust her hips in aggravation against the counter behind which she ruled, making cowrie shell necklaces and black coral jewelry hop in their displays. He took a shirt, threw money on the glass of the countertop, and hurried for the door.

“Oh my my my,” the saleslady bawled. “You come back, eh?”

The sight of dollars transformed her into a calm ally of commerce. Harpooned by the sharpness of her command, he stood by as she licked a pencil point with her tongue and painstakingly added and subtracted figures on a tiny gray pad, boxing her scratches into one corner of the paper. Mitchell reclothed himself. The arms of the tee shirt barely rounded the curve of his shoulders, the hem hung an inch above his navel. He was made inflated, musclebound and awkward by the shirt, a burlesque act. A bizarre logo expanded across his pectorals, a yellow and brownish Brahman bull, the colors blended along their borders into a rancid green so that the animal, stretched into a lethargic dragon, looked as though it had been dredged from a slime pond.
Without the farmer the world can't spin
, read the slogan ballooning underneath the beast.
St. Catherine Agricultural Exposition 1977
. The shoplady conquered the mathematics of the sales tax. He was due small change, which she counted twice and shoved at him, and provided a receipt without his asking:
Mr. White. Porchis one shurt. $9.35EC
. The virtue of financial transaction was its power to rocket above other failures to communicate.