That Savage Water (19 page)

In India, Cassie had locked herself in the guesthouse for days on end. She hadn't wanted to go outside ever since they'd seen a body, thin as a skeleton but still alive, lying in a puddle of its own urine outside the Meenakshi temple. Like stale oatmeal plagued with raisins, blackflies had settled along its naked spine. A few metres down the street, a man stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the prow of his rickshaw, bored. Beneath its wheel, a small bird hopped in the dirt searching for crumbs among a crushed marigold garland. The man's chin tilted to his chest as he rubbed his eyes with his palms and yawned. The bird cocked its head and then swooped up to a branch that extended over the stone wall of the temple. From somewhere deep inside, a bell began to ring as if needing to break the scorching air for weighing too much. In the dust, a parade of ants scurried towards the liquid pooling around the body. Blocked, they stopped short and then detoured up the person's leg bone, crossing to its other side. Cassie had gasped when the skeleton suddenly shifted and the puddle began to expand across the dust before dripping down the curb into the gutter. She'd been petrified the creature would crawl towards her, crack her open with its cries for food, cling to her forever. From then on she'd wanted to leave India. In Hampi she'd been petrified of thieves. She hadn't been able to eat solid food since Agra. Worse was Varanasi where bodies were burned into charcoal mummies on top of the funeral pyres, billows of sparks shooting skyward from the hulls of their collapsing ribcages.

Do you think it's possible to fear a place in theory? – Cassie asked.

Miles responded that most of what we fear is already theoretical and Cassie stared for a moment at the water swirling down the drain in a murky whirlpool and then out at the laundry line:
I can't anymore
. She wondered if it was possible to love something only in theory also.

It's just that I survived a disaster of my own – Miles said. He wiped the excess oil on his shins and sat straddling the lounge chair, facing Jesus. Since arriving, his own skin had taken on an effervescent caramel glow that made him feel like a glazed duck in a Chinatown window – I held onto a palm tree. It doesn't seem like much, but there were several waves.


For how long?

Six hours, thereabout. You ate seagulls. I know it doesn't compare.


It does
– Jesus said –
We both did what was necessary to survive
.

Jesus went on to explain to Miles how they'd been able to catch fish by making hooks with string from their clothing and wire picked from the engine. They dove into the water with ropes tied to their waist and harpooned sea turtles with a shard of metal lashed to an oar. He'd strangled the creatures with his hands as their flippers spasmed against the boat's wooden siding, their liquidy eyes blinking, weeping in slow motion. He described how he'd never expected how much would be packed inside that shell or how soft what keeps us alive is. After three months, he'd forgotten what trees looked like, how it felt to stand still. They'd collected rainwater in gasoline containers and stayed awake in shifts to scan the horizon for distant flashes of cargo ships or fishing vessels. One of the men had refused to eat the raw meat and starved to death. They'd lived with the corpse on board for two days before rolling it over the side. Finally, off the coast of the Marshall Islands, he and his friend had been rescued, two hundred and seventy days later, by a Taiwanese tuna trawler named
Koo's 102
. Miles stared at Jesus' hands as he talked, wondering if they looked any different as they strangled a turtle.


Is there a girlfriend?

Mine?


No one comes to a beach resort alone. Am I wrong?

You did – Miles said. Cassie had dragged the inflatable bed onto shore and she stood in the shallows, bending down every so often and picking at something beneath the waves that lapped at her ankles. Gulls circled above her, landed, then padded across the sand to the blow-up bed, pecking the sand around it.

There's a girlfriend. She's enjoys resorts – Miles continued – She hated India. I forgave her for that though…


She's beautiful when she's smiling
– Jesus spotted Cassie –
She seems to enjoy the ocean
.

 … I slept with a woman in Thailand – Miles responded, almost automatically – Before the tsunami, after Cassie went home.

The memory surfaced from a place Miles had buried deep beneath the events of the disaster, like a diver being pulled to the surface by a balloon of air. When the tsunami was over, he'd just been happy to be alive. The water had come for him and he'd survived. He'd been given a clear second chance and he'd squandered it immediately, insanely – More of a girl really… I didn't know at the time.


A girl
– Jesus said.

Miles watched Cassie lift the bottom of her foot and examine it. She cradled the blow-up bed beneath her arm and limped up the beach towards the pool, the toes of her foot curled as talons as she walked.

I've never told her – Miles confessed – She admires me so much for making it through a disaster. How does someone not become what they survived?


It's much too late for that, señor
– Jesus answered calmly –
A disaster is exactly that, because of what it takes from you. Once it's happened, it's mandatory you lack a feeling of wholeness afterward. And don't expect to forget it. Like I said, it wasn't the ocean that scared me. Your girlfriend is coming this way. But I think it would be good for us to talk again. My heart tells me you need someone who understands catastrophe.

Cassie stood on the far side of the pool by their empty lounge chairs squeezing the water from her ponytail. She squinted against the brightness, scanning for Miles in the pool and then on the chairs around the deck. For a moment, Miles hoped she wouldn't see him. He lowered his gaze at the deck, as he watched the water darken the concrete where the drops of sweat had gathered since he'd arrived at Jesus' chair. The tan line from his flip-flops made a deep Y shape on the top of his foot. To the right, a similar puddle had grown around Jesus' toes, small and almost feminine, but with wisps of black hair growing from the tops of each.

Catastrophe… – Miles repeated.


Your girlfriend
– Jesus lowered his sunglasses –
She really has an exceptional body
.

Miles watched the puddle around his foot expand across the desert of textured surface until finally it made one single pool with the water around Jesus' feet. Miles suddenly felt better, as though the empty feeling had drained from him leaving him full and strangely satisfied – Yes, she does.

Miles? – Cassie said from behind him.

He looked up at her shape silhouetted against the sun and blue sky. For some reason he thought of boat travel and jet skis and seashells being pulverized into perfect white sand.

I cut my foot – Cassie said – Look.

She held it out, giving Jesus a cursory glance – I must have stepped on some glass… – The bottom of her sole was indented with the texture of the decking; sand had dried into the horseshoe crevices of her toenails.


Maybe it was a piece of shell?
– Jesus offered.

No – Cassie looked at Jesus coldly – It was glass. I'm going inside to find a bandage. I'm starving too. I feel like I haven't eaten for days.

It was nice to meet you – Miles said, standing – Congratulations on surviving your disaster.


The pleasure was mine. It gets better, as they say
.

What did that mean? – Cassie asked, as they stepped into the air-conditioned lobby. After the pool decking, the burgundy carpet felt noticeably softer, more organic, like moss or the trimmed grass of a putting green. Years ago they must have permitted smoking inside; there was a faint odour of tobacco mixed with carpet shampoo.

What did what mean?

Congratulations on surviving your disaster. Who was that guy? And a Speedo? Really?

He's Mexican.

I don't think that's any excuse. God, I could eat a horse.

Cassie found a resort worker in a trim black uniform and showed him her injured foot. The man brought her arm around his neck and led her into a hidden corridor of supply and personnel offices. From inside the lobby, Miles watched Jesus run his fingers beneath the elastic of his bathing suit, smoothing the hair around his navel with the oil. He stood and looked out at the ocean, then lifted his foot to examine something on its sole. Behind him, a gull began to devour an empty Styrofoam plate, a ravenous clump of feathers. Hunger would lead a person to do anything, Miles thought. You could never know what horrible things you were capable of until you'd done them and then there was no taking them back. How many fish would it take to feed all five thousand? Miles wondered as he stood watching Jesus. How many humans to satisfy one giant fish?


A female bomber pretending to be pregnant detonated the first one…
– Harim struggles to keep up with the pace of translation. He picks out bits the crowd of men shout at him –
…A male bomber also blew himself up as the ambulances arrived…

Clusters of deflated balloons hang from a tower of amplifiers, motionless in the boiling afternoon. Black char sprays up an adjoining cinderblock wall, its dark umbra fanning outward as though painted on with a blowtorch – some arsonist's quick graffiti. Shredded, the remains of party streamers, once the same crisp white as the bride's dress, have long since been trampled. Concrete rubble and chunks of broken stone lay scattered across the scorched ground nearly to the road. Plastic chairs coated with skins of dust lay strewn around the car-sized crater. Where three men crouch staring into it, the hole gets deeper and the water turns from black to red. Behind them, the burnt-out wedding car, scorched and skeletal, a bouquet of plastic flowers melted off the rear bumper. A sudden breeze that smells like cardamom drafts a balloon out from under a chair and settles it behind the rim of the car.

An old woman draped in black appears in the doorway of the adjacent building. She wails in Arabic and carries a goldframed portrait of the young bride. Her burka skims the pools of blood at her feet before she collapses, disconsolate, into the arms of her nephew or son or stranger. The crowd begins to push towards us, incensed into a suffocating nearness like an agitated herd preparing to stampede. As they push in around me, I lift the camera again to my eye and snap at their lamenting faces. This is for my protection. People will give a camera distance; they wil give a woman with a camera al the distance she needs.

One man grabs my wrist and pulls me towards the edge of the crater. He points down into the water. Hovering just beneath the surface, the bride's slender hand with painted fingernails severed at the wrist. I aim through the viewfinder, pivoting my lens so the reflection of the man's grief-stricken face is reflected in the hand's open palm: a harrowing portrait framed in the crosshairs.

I release the shutter. Gorgeous.

Paul and I are at the opening of a Magnum exhibition of combat photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario in downtown Toronto. The whole CBC set crew is invited, though it was I, not Paul, who'd made arrangements for us to attend. Shot in Vietnam, Biafra, Afghanistan and Nicaragua, the images are a curated conglomeration of catastrophe, neatly framed, matted and aligned on the imperfect red brick walls. If you squint and stand at a distance, they take on the appearance of textured abstract prints, like neutral pastels crushed on concrete. It's a trick I play when I shoot so I can frame the geometry right, though Paul had once confessed that shapes and body parts weren't at all similar. For a camera technician, he's oddly oblivious to the basic principles of photography.

Standing in a towel at the bathroom sink after I'd blow-dried my hair, I told Paul that combat journalists like myself brought their respect to an exhibition like this one. With his crew from CBC, an open bar would seem like some fraternity challenge meant to be surmounted.

Why do pictures require good behavior? – Paul combed his moustache – We're not at work, Les. For Chrissakes, loosen up.

I'm only asking you to take it easy. I know the people there.

Know
was intoned in a way that meant
don't embarrass me
, but Paul is as defiant as he is skilled at telling jokes. With a rocks glass in his hand, he stands in the corner of the gallery, his fellow camera technicians cracking up around him at regular intervals in loud rifts of laughter. Behind him and to his left is a large colour photograph of a group of Palestinian refugees freshly executed on the streets of Beirut. To his right, in black and white, a mother and her four children huddle by the bank of a muddy river in South Vietnam as overhead a gunman in a chopper lines them up.

What's the definition of confusion? – Paul baits the group that begins to gather with each passing volley. The grin on his face tells me he's feeling pretty damn good about himself – Blind lesbians in a fish market.

The crowd of men is an eruption of molars and clanking glasses under arches of high-fives. His timing is impeccable, which makes it easier to despise him because he's so damned good at being lewd.

Really, Les? – My best friend Greta feigns disgust and pulls me away.

I asked him to behave – I apologize – You can't expect me to control a grown man.

But her eyes stay glued to him in that way I've seen a dozen women lock their gaze. The way I did when I was an enthusiastic intern studying him from the news desk as he adjusted the giant TV cameras.

Our reporting headquarters are stationed in the reception room of the old Emperor Hotel. Across the street, the Tigris meanders down the centre of Baghdad, a cool ribbon spanned by wide stone bridges that absorb the heat of the encroaching desert and then release it outward in ripples of shimmering air.