Bunny and Shark (2 page)

Day one dead

(In which Bunny curls up to the

sea and the bastard's sailboat.)

N
IGHT BRINGS DARKNESS
all of a sudden on the islands. The boaters are watching the giant cruisers make grand parades of themselves as they cross under the bridge. Everyone throws water balloons back and forth, from boat to bar, bar to boat, as the bridge rises and falls. It happens every day at five. Barefoot and with a black eye, among the happy-hour crowd, you're daring to stand out too much. You duck in and out from behind parked cars, not seeing anyone you recognize. You run down the narrow road that leads to the house of the Authorities where Coke-Bottle works.

Directly opposite the Authorities, the lobster-seller in the shade of a palm. The man you've known for years sits in the damp garden sheltered by an overhang of tangled trees. You've stood at the periphery of this garden many times before, peering into what is often mistaken for a doghouse. A lobster pool, in fact. The bastard always waited in the car with his sunglasses on, even at night, while you made the transaction with the lobster-seller, a preparation for dinner for the group at your house, your pretty pink villa set deep in the mountainside. Always lavish fair.

You picture the bastard as he must be now: in a clean outfit, pacing along the vast balcony, staring out to the point where he pushed you over.

What will the group say to the bastard tonight after he's expertly shucked all the oysters, after he's readied each course purely for the love of showing off? What will they say when, after all, you aren't there to serve them? “Where is Bunny?” they will ask, confused.

You, smiling enormously as you always did, your tanned hands covered in rings, doling out champagne. “Hey there Bunny-honey,” they'd say. And swat you on your ass, too big to be a Playboy ass anymore, your fat ass. Your fingers, long and lacquered, dealing cash and cards faster than lightning, would run slow trails over their suited shoulders as you leaned into them at the table, wafting each one with perfumed cleavage, entrancing them with your passing constellation of diamonds.

While you mesmerized them, those eager ass-swatters sunk everything, all their millions, into staying on the island, and inch by inch, devoured its lands. They paid the big-boss, the bastard, and you, Bunny, for a life's worth of protection. All of you drunk with collusion and the promise of isolation and everlasting wealth.

Which way out of this?

Chief Authority Coke-Bottle: the bastard's friend and a regular at the house. You are counting on it, that he is at your villa this very second, brandy snifter in hairy hand, oversized oculars half-closed and tipped up to your faux-finish ceiling. The golden liquid sliding, again and again, down his throat. The shell-sculpted mirrors reflecting him everywhere.

You stand outside the Precinct, not sure what to do. Dwarf palms blow around your legs. The lobster-seller doesn't even see you, you are crouching now, seeing Coke-Bottle's face multiply itself endlessly, you can't shake it. Taking your chances, you run to the Precinct door, catch a whiff of the dogs loose on the road, and pull the door open. Feel the air conditioning.

The room is informal and overly bright. Even if Coke-Bottle isn't here, the other officers will report that some white woman was claiming her husband tried to kill her. Coke-Bottle will know.

Your bad eye pulses harder than the fluorescents, but the black men who wait know how to ignore you and yet see everything. Still, you find yourself standing there trying to hide.

An old man waves pensioner's papers to no one, to his god likely. Beside him another of the bastard's cohorts: the Italian's live-in maid, glancing your way. Impossible. She looks away like a puppet string yanked her head. You turn heel at the magazine stand, change your mind and sit down with your back to the room. The attendant glances up from his desk, says nothing, and you hear sounds of people behind him, in the offices far off, putting on jackets, changing shoes, rustling car keys. Getting ready to go home. You think: just stand up and walk back out into the balmy air.

Rushing outside, you plant yourself behind a nearby parked car. Coke-Bottle's voice growls something as the Precinct door swings open. He pulls a stream of laughter, his and others', out into the hot night. His presence is so enormous you have time to hide within the echo of his scattering reverberations. Then hear plain as day his voice again, this time speaking quietly into his cellphone: “No, no signs. Seems everything is going to be alright for you, but yeah, yeah, I'll keep an eye out. Yeah, yeah, cool it, they've been notified. Bunny's good as dead, pal.”

Coke-Bottle's car drives away as you make your way down the beach road. The lobster-seller doesn't miss a beat of his hum-song, but raises an eyebrow. The hot skin of your feet on asphalt is electric, transporting you, inch by inch, back towards the water, where you were delivered. A miracle, the dolphins, no question. Sustain this, please. You can't handle the real of this yet. The let-down of walking on the ground, the dead-heavy slowness of it. The dolphins made a cradle for you, just go back there to them, to where you're protected. You deserve to be protected, you were born to that.

The smell of takeout goes by, something fried, devoured, discarded, a crumple in your ear. Girls in gold earrings as large as baskets hang around, their laughter mixing with the smell of the food you couldn't buy if you wanted to. Reaching the end of the road, you glance towards a garbage bag that looks just put out. Beside it, a pair of shoes. They are the hearty, lace-up leather kind worn by older live-in maids. The shoes fit you perfectly.

Light-headed when you lift yourself up from the street after putting them on, you think: now I can at least walk somewhere. But you're not sure where to go without any money. You don't even have a purse to carry so that it looks like you have money.

You reach the end of another small road, one leading to the beach by the bay. All locals here. You'll only be able to stay by night in these parts. Tonight you'll sleep tucked up next to the abandoned house. First you walk your new shoes right over the steep ledge of sand and sit down there to listen. Not so far out from the shore you see a number of anchored sailboats: Coke-Bottle's sleek black vessel, the Italian's blue, the bastard's newly painted red and white. Your eye is now all closed up and quiet and you stare for a long time at those haunted emblems of the men who will continue to sit at your dinner table. Until your one good eye becomes exhausted, loses focus, and with it the facts of the boats and the reality of the distances that surround you. You see your own boat shape-shift against the strain on your good eye, it becomes a blob, then a sea creature, so you close your eyes to think of what's inside. Make the tour of the sailboat.

Last time you were there it was dawn. You left in the dinghy, left the bastard sprawled out in his bed, the sheets and his drunk flesh pouring into the small cabin. All drunk and dressed up. But now it is empty. In blackness you roam the cabin. You can feel yourself right there, opening the cupboards and cracking a bottle of fizzy water. Your narrow bed with the silk sheets and your clothes stuffed in the drawers. Your magazines and your watch in the cubby by the bed. It would be so easy to swim out there and sleep in your bed and put on your watch. Can you steal the time back again for good?

Fuck these shoes, fuck invisible. Fuck these shoes. You kick them off and head straight for the shoes you now see before you, your own expensive sandals in the closet of the cabin next to the fire extinguisher. You're still an excellent swimmer even if you are getting old. You find you are running, the water isn't even cold or threatening, it is a pathway back; it will only take you half an hour to get there if you swim fast.

/ / /

As you swim, the pulse of the dolphin's strange skin stays with you, like body recall that lasts long after the lover is gone. You feel sure that the dolphin embedded its soundless whine in you and that now you too are a reader of the dark channels. Your body has vibrational power, it sends ciphers out behind each kick as if to say, Here I come. No fear of sharks or jellies – you'll sense them if they're near – nor of the airless darkness. Yes, in the water you are lightness itself, your fat flies off you, drifts away behind you, makes you lithe and sleek and fast. Queen of the breaststroke, you drop deeper underwater and you feel your old power come back. Warm and confident, you continue making wide arcs in front of you, leaving a solid wake behind you. You have a destination. A plan.

To forget the land. And the palms and the Precinct and the friends' villas you'd had visions of sneaking into. It is the sailboats that are sanctuaries. Their locks are feeble and, anyhow, you know where the spare keys are. You can picture them hanging from a tiny plastic buoy hidden behind the wooden shutters of the cabin doors or lying at the base of a heavy coil of rope.

The sea goes suddenly cold. Salt shores up and flocks densely around you, blindly magnetized to your skin. Because you are not the sea. You are blaring and human and soluble. You swallow a mouthful of the saltwater to feel the purity of its threat: how it is capable of dissolving your organs, then your bones, then lastly, your skin. From the inside out you will be nullified. You will become a suspension.

Liquid dust, you are nothing without him. You say his name out loud. Instead of saying “the bastard” you say his real name. Then you say it again, wanting to exorcise yourself of him, but the effect is opposite. His name overwhelms and belittles you. You cry out an embarrassed, stilted sound, barely any voice left. There is a shuttling wall of fire welling up in you, running slow and liquid, starting at your heart and spreading outwards. You push against it. The onslaught is almost peaceful. The enormity of murder being so straightforward.

Fucking bastard: the shark pit was a joke. Your joke even; you told the bastard and the others about it, that ten to twelve sharks slummed regularly at the foot of the Lowlands cliff. But it was a myth. So how was it that the bastard made a real shark appear?

You sob, right there in the middle of the sea. Your arms get drained of all their power, they hang disembodied at your sides. You have to stop, turn onto your back. Float. Your miracle and your plans evaporate: he betrayed you. He cut you out.

Tread water, keep afloat, breathe hard. Breathe so the red-and-white boat looming out in front of you comes to within an arm's reach.

The ladder is down. You bring yourself close to it and put your foot on the slippery step, feeling the hard tug of the ocean as you pull yourself up. You take your clothes off immediately, balling them up and pitching them overboard. Naked and dripping you watch them sink. But do they? You don't stick around to find out. Check later, you think. Your footprints will be dry soon. You'll leave no traces. Trust he won't remember what was there and what wasn't. You'll eat sparingly.

You take the key from the hiding place and open the lock without having to force it. As you crouch down the narrow stairs into the low cabin compartment, the smell of your own perfume hits you hard, as does your sudden sense of house-possession. The familiarity and comfort of it all and how it's all still your world. The bastard's bed, everything as you pictured it to be: bottles and glasses spread out over the cabin, your watch, exactly where you remembered it to be, the food you'd thought of still there on the shelves. You take the food, fall into your bed, and eat it, doing everything all at the same time, making crumbs, putting on your watch, wanting to do everything, to have everything, to be everything this represents.

Jumping up again. Stopping yourself from cleaning up, but doing it mentally. Then stopping that impulse. You must memorize the arrangement of everything and not touch too much. Can fingerprints be dated? Will he expect to find that rotting tray of hors d'oeuvres next time he comes, or can you throw it away? It smells. Stop it. Let it reek.

“Rot on him,” you say, food falling out of your mouth.

Curl your body up into your sheets away from the filth and into the darkness. You breathe in the smell of yourself. So pungent and new. Still you. Just deeper somehow.

/ / /

By morning, it rains. Without thinking of anything, certainly not danger, you stretch out your arms behind your head and glance down to your thighs. A thing you do every morning with mild disgust and no definite plans to do anything about it. Then the usual thoughts of coffee and breakfast and cigarettes. Jesus, you say, through a cough and a laugh, your hands scramble around the cubbies by your bed. Where are your cigarettes? While your hands search, a hint of fear passes into your heart. Your hands continue searching while you look out your porthole window, scanning for something coming your way. Nothing: only more and more ocean water in one direction, and across the way, through the other porthole: the shore, houses, people as specks starting to fill up the beach. You pull your sheets up around you as you spot a pack of cigarillos under the bastard's bed. You make the effort to reach for them and light up with the bastard's gold lighter.

“The pit was a myth and somehow a real shark appeared to eat me all up. You piece of shit,” you say, smoking. “You retarded piece of shit, feeding me to a myth,” you say, getting louder, until you find you are raving and ashing all over the cabin, not caring about the glasses you smash on purpose, overturning the objects not nailed down to the floor. You run over to the bastard's bed, and rip the sheets off and rub the stub of cigar and all the ash and peels into his pillow.