The High Places (23 page)

‘Open your eyes,' said Miss Lewis. She loved to see her children open their eyes all at once. They always smiled, as if relieved to see the sun on the other side of their eyelids. They giggled and pressed their hands together, and looked at each other's hands, and looked at Joseph, and wondered who now had the Button. Oh, that beautiful Button: mustard-coloured, Joseph-kissed. Round as a planet on one side, sharp as a kiss on the other. Joseph stood with his hands behind his back. His hair hung over his eyes. It was hard to puzzle Joseph out in Buttony. The children delayed for a fond moment, as if wanting to leave him alone with his secret a little longer. Miss Lewis surveyed the circle to see who was blushing, who was still smiling, whose head was raised higher than usual, just because Joseph had favoured them with the Button. And she also looked for the disconsolate signs of a child who was clearly buttonless.

‘You start, Miranda,' said Miss Lewis.

Miranda rubbed her right ear against her right shoulder. She swayed on one leg.

‘Xin,' she said. Xin produced a goofy smile. Then she opened out her hands: there was no Button there.

‘Blake,' said Xin. Blake grinned and threw his empty hands over his head.

Blake said Miranda. Miranda said Josie. Josie said Osea. Osea said Ramon. Miss Lewis closed her eyes. She opened them again and thought, Jyoti. It took eleven more children to guess Jyoti. She was one of those girls you didn't suspect. Her socks slipped. She had a mole on her left cheek. It was like Joseph to have picked Jyoti. It was like Jyoti to stand burning invisibly in the circle, hardly able to believe her luck. Her hands unfolded and there was the Button. The other children craned to look. For a moment they loved her. For a moment she held Joseph's kiss in her hands. She stepped into the middle of the circle and Joseph took her place. She raised the Button to her lips, but didn't kiss it.

‘Hands out, eyes closed,' said Miss Lewis, and darkness fell. ‘Don't forget, Jyoti, no giving the Button to the person who was just It. Don't give the Button to Joseph.'

It was necessary to remind the children of this rule at the beginning of every game; otherwise they were capable of handing the Button over to Joseph at any opportunity. As it was, Jyoti picked Archie and Archie picked Joseph. Joseph picked Mimi who picked Miranda who picked Joseph. The afternoon grew brighter. Planes flew overhead in all directions. The jacaranda dropped its spring flowers. Every now and then Miss Lewis saw faces at the windows of classrooms as other children looked out to see them playing Buttony. How long had they been playing now? These children could spend the whole afternoon hoping to be chosen by Joseph. They would never tire of it.

Joseph picked Ruby picked Ramon picked Joseph picked Liam S picked Liam M picked Joseph. Joseph said, Buttony, Buttony, Buttony, twenty-one times. Miss Lewis closed her eyes and kept them closed when she said, ‘Open your eyes.' The children, in turn, said, Buttony, Buttony, Buttony. She uncrossed her ankles and crossed them again and thought, Every day could pass like this, quite easily. Every day could be sweet and green with the jacaranda and the children and the sun and the planes. And then at the end of them all, the sweet days and the children, Would you open your eyes? Would your hands fall open? Would they be empty?

Miss Lewis looked. Joseph stood in the circle.

‘Hands out, close your eyes,' she said, and the children obeyed. They bent their heads as if praying. She was moved by the tenderness she saw fall on each of them. They were like children in a fairy tale, under a spell. She looked at Joseph and he was watching her, so she nodded at him. His face was impassive. He made her think of a Swiss Guard at the Vatican. He received her nod by beginning to walk around the circle, and each hand he touched trembled, and every child lowered their head still further as he passed them. Their hands closed like sea anemones. Joseph hadn't yet given away the Button. Fifteen, nineteen, twenty-one times he said Buttony. Then he raised his neutral face and looked at Miss Lewis and opened his mouth and placed the Button inside it. The Button made no indentation in his cheek. Miss Lewis crossed her arms. You will solve this, she thought, and suffer for it. Joseph blinked inside his hair.

‘Open your eyes,' said Miss Lewis. The children lifted their heads into the burden of their love for Joseph. They smiled and squirmed and began to guess: Phoebe, Ruby, Usha, Archie, Blake. Joseph turned toward every name as it was called, as if waiting to see who might produce the Button. Liam S, Bella, Jackson, Xin. Twenty names, and twenty hands falling open. Only Jyoti remained. She stood with her rigid hands, with her desperate smile, with her socks slipping. No one wanted to say her name. They wanted her to give herself up. Miss Lewis, too, wanted Jyoti to give herself up. Eventually Ramon said, ‘Jyoti.'

Jyoti opened her empty hands.

The circle laughed. Miss Lewis had found that children, as a rule, didn't like practical jokes. There was a certain kind of laughter that, in children, was a howl. Ramon took Jyoti's wrists and inspected her hands. No one looked at Joseph, but they all saw Jyoti: the mole on her cheek, the dusty mark where she'd rubbed her shin with the heel of her shoe, the crookedness of her teeth. Jyoti might have been crying. Ramon threw her wrists down as if discarding them. Then every child save Joseph and Jyoti began to cry out, just as they'd done when they wanted to play Buttony. They stamped their feet and kicked at the grass. They shook their uniforms and looked up into the branches of the jacaranda tree, as if they might find the Button in these places. Their circle broke open as they shook and kicked and shouted, and faces appeared again in classroom windows.

Miss Lewis watched Joseph stand there with his mouth closed and his hands behind his back. Although the circle had broken, he still seemed to be in the middle of it. He was only a boy and he was alone and proud and terrible. Miss Lewis stepped away from the tree. She would order him to open his mouth and spit out the Button. She would make him say what he had done, how he had stood and watched the children guess; she would shame him, and the faces in the windows would see it.

But first she should settle the children. She clapped her hands five times in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet, but they didn't copy her. She saw the way they looked at her; she saw their fury. Ramon came first, to pull at her pockets. Then Josie, who had lost a tooth that morning; her mouth was open as she searched the grass at Miss Lewis's feet. Osea and Mimi scratched at the scabbed bark of the tree. Miss Lewis swatted and slapped, but the children still came. They opened her hands and dug in her elbows. Liam S squatted to peer up her skirt, and when she crouched to stop him, it was Jyoti who pulled the pins from her hair, as if the Button might be hidden in its roots. Now Miss Lewis cried out. She lifted her head and saw Mr Graham running from the 3A classroom. And Joseph was behind him, not quite running, not altogether, but like a shadow, long and blank and beautiful.

 

Good News for Modern Man

When I began my study of the colossal squid, I still believed in God. The squid seemed to me then, in those God days, to be the secretly swimming proof of a vast maker who had bestowed intelligence – surprisingly, here and there – on both man and mollusc. I've discussed this with Charles Darwin, who visits me most days, always a little out of breath. His cheeks are red, his hair white. He looks nothing like a ghost. He puts his feet up on the rocks and gazes out over this small corner of the Pacific, calm at sundown and partially obscured by a mosquito haze. We sit above the tree line and consider the movements of the colossal squid in her bay below. She moves this way and that; she floats and billows in the tide. She reminds me of my mother's underwear soaking in a holiday basin. Her official name, her name in polite company, is
Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni
. We've named her Mabel and together we plan to free her.

It's no easy thing, this freeing of a colossal squid. It was difficult enough to imprison her in the first place. There is the issue of her size.

‘A colossal squid,' I tell Darwin, ‘makes a giant squid look like a bath toy.'

He agrees with me, although as far as I know he has never seen either a bath toy or a giant squid. He remains surprisingly unexcited by my account of Mabel's capture: the months-long hunt with smaller squid for bait, the boredom and fussy seasickness, Mabel emerging from the sea with her hood pink in the sudden sun. She flailed at the surface, she swam and sounded, smelling as much like the sea as anything I have ever smelled. But we hooked her, and we panicked her, and she raced ahead of us, right into this bay, through a narrow channel that we were able to block. And now she spends her days here, rotating among her many arms, and I spend my days watching her. They're going to build her a facility, but first there's money to raise and laws to change. For now it's just the two of us – and Darwin.

Darwin first appeared on my 402nd day on the island. We often argue, but in a neutral, brotherly sort of way, and I appreciate his company. The sun sinks into the sea, but we also see it rise from the sea. This makes the world seem very small, even though we're two hours from any town. There's a Catholic school higher up the mountain and we see the girls walk down to the water and back up again. I hear their singing in the early morning and it surprises me; at sundown it makes me sad. Late in the afternoons they swim in the white sea – far out into the lagoon, where I often see bullet-shaped sharks. Darwin and I take turns peering through my binoculars. It's an innocent and companionable lechery. Although he's a ghost, he leaves sweat around the eyepieces.

I've been thinking for some time of taking one of the monthly supply boats back to New Zealand, then a plane home. At home the rain will be cold, pigeons will grow fat, there will be supermarkets. I've refused replacements and talked up the malarial solitude and now no one will come, not even over-eager graduate students with an itching for the Pacific. But this is my 498th day on the island, and lately I'm troubled by headaches and abrupt changes in temperature. There's something feverish about this air. It's not only the headaches, although they're bad enough; my major symptom is a kind of vertigo, a frequent and sudden awareness that the universe is expanding out from me. This feeling begins with my feet, as if the ground – the planet – the galaxy – has suddenly dropped away from them and I'm floating untethered in space, only space doesn't exist, and neither does my body. I can only describe the sensation as the suspension of nothing in nothing. But I look down and there are my feet, dirt-brown, and there are Darwin's, sensibly shod. Below our feet swims Mabel. It's only while watching Mabel that I feel tied to the earth once more and a sense of order is restored. Still, that moment of vertigo is briefly and terrifyingly glorious. It reminds me of the way, when I was younger, I used to feel my body respond to the singing of hymns: an interior fire, a constriction of the heart that I took for a visitation of the Holy Spirit. I never mentioned this sensation to anyone. Maybe other people feel it. Perhaps the schoolgirls on the mountain feel it, singing in their concrete church: the large feeling of singing toward something that sings back. I often wondered if sex felt that way, undernourished adolescent that I was. And now – the quiet sky, the patient waiting, the tick of time in the bones, until the world rushes out and the vanishing of the cosmos presents itself again, magnificent.

I've told Darwin of my troubles (he suspects malaria, which is possible; I stopped taking my meds on day 300, partly because of the dreams they gave me, bright crystal dreams of exhausting flight). Sitting here, atop our hot rock, we might be the last two survivors of the flood, chosen by Noah: a pair of scientists, two by two. But the ark broke up somewhere along the Line and left us stranded with a squid for company. Darwin regards me sadly when I say this, stroking his diluvian chin.

‘Geology,' he says, ‘disproves you.'

‘I know,' I tell him. ‘It's a joke.'

I live in an astronomical observation station owned and, until recently, forgotten by the New Zealand government. It's partway up the mountain, and I can walk down to the sea in thirteen minutes. Paths have been cut into the rock, as if this were a holiday beach frequented by sure-footed children, but it's still a relief to step out onto the sand from the mountain path, to see the sea spread wide and to my left the smaller inlet that is Mabel's temporary home. The clear water is deeper than it looks from above. When I say the water in Mabel's bay is clear, I don't mean it's transparent, but that it's see-throughable, and Mabel is see-able there at the bottom. I feed her fish thawed from a deep freeze, or freshly caught if I'm in the mood, and these she grasps at the end of her tentacles and rolls up toward her beaked mouth. The coral sand is sharp and clean and my feet never feel dirty. When Darwin accompanies me (which he usually does on those days I'm feeling my worst), he only removes his shoes to wade into the shallows, and then his feet are the delicate brown and blue and yellow of Galápagos finches.

The view of Mabel from the shore is more intimate than the bird's-eye view from my station fifteen metres above. It's impossible to take in her vastness or the pattern of her tentacles and arms, so it's her eyes that fascinate me. They interest Darwin as well. They're hard to avoid. Mabel has the largest eye in creation, and it looks like ours, although its structure is entirely different. This humanoid appearance far out on the lone branch of invertebrate evolution gave scientists pause, at one time; they paused over Darwin and his theory of natural selection. The eye of the squid once gave my friend a great deal of trouble. Now he and I stand on the shore and consider the vertebrate appearance of Mabel's canny eye. It looks so very God-given. Difficult to assume that such an eye doesn't think, or ponder, or dream.