The Plover: A Novel (20 page)

Do you always talk like this?

Only since my mouth works again.

Are you going to press charges?

I have an idea for a different approach to the matter, said the minister. I have a bigger idea than revenge or restoration. I have an idea, which, if it takes root, and spreads widely, and flowers in myriad ways that even I cannot see, will change matters, on such a scale that the men who stole my life from me, and nearly caused my death, and exiled me from my home, and tried to thieve and quash a vision that I can articulate but that many people already share, a vision possessed and owned by no one, a vision that cannot be kidnapped or killed or set adrift on a raft, well, those men will be defeated in their reliance on theft and violence, and their crime against me will be redressed, but I will take pleasure not so much in justice delivered in one small incident, in the long view, but in the ever so much larger, or oceanic, arena.

The nurse, one of those remarkable women with a stern implacable face but a joyous musical spirit behind the mask, laughed aloud, changed the bandages on his neck, told him he might very carefully sponge himself with a wet cloth if he wished to approximate a bath, checked his vitals, brought him a bowl of poi, and told the doctor that the patient was essentially recovered and could be released in the care of the boat. He’s bubbling away a mile a minute in there, she said. It’s like he has to catch up on all the words he didn’t say when he was on the raft. No, he has no money. File him under indigent.

Not under emergency care?

Yes but no, she said. It was an emergency for
him
but we’ll never get reimbursed for that. I’d file him indigent or impecunious and call it a day. The man with the broken arm will pay his fee, but the burned man has nothing but the remains of the suit he was wearing.

Impecunious it is, says the doctor. I note that the impecunious file is fatter than the indigent file, why is that?

Longer word, says the nurse, and they both grin.

*   *   *

Enrique called cheerfully to passing fishermen to ask after the green boat with the red sails. It is my cousin, and I must tell him of a new baby in the family! He asked radio operators on islands about the green boat. I owe the captain money, and I want to pay my debts! He asked harbormasters and shipping agents. That captain is my business partner, and we are being sent to Tahiti! He seemed to be splitting himself in half. One part of him was the old Enrique with a cold eye for money and a brain like a machine for profit and odds and percentages and corners to cut. The new part was a sort of ravening, a hunger that got worse every day that it was not fed. He lost weight. He spoke less. He had visions. He could feel himself splintering. He was afraid of
nothing,
nothing could ever faze or terrify him ever again, he was a silent verb in a world of clownish nouns, he would rain fire upon that which must be burned; but some shred of him
was
afraid, some deep sliver of the boy he had once been; and with mounting anger he squelched this boy, the small boy in a dark corner watching the candles, he cornered the fear and burned it in rage, but he could not erase it completely, and sometimes he sat for an hour over his charts terrified that the price for finding the green boat would be losing the last seeds of himself—his truest and deepest self, not the man he had created but the man he might have been, might still be; the man with a mother and a father and brothers; the man who might one day marry and have children; the man who might not be a grim verb, a fuse, a simmering machine, a human orca, but something else altogether; something he could not imagine, or not let himself imagine; but he knew it was still barely possible, and that it could only grow from the seeds of the boy in the dark corner, and that those seeds grew more brittle by the day. One time when he was a small boy an uncle gave him a handful of seeds to start his own garden. It was his seventh birthday and he took the seven seeds and hid them from his brothers and took them out only late at night to gaze upon and touch gently in amazement that they were his and they meant food. The season for planting came and he did not plant, and the season for harvest came and he did not harvest, and a second season for planting passed, and still he did not plant them, but only took them out of their secret box late at night to roll them in his fingers and gape in amazement; until one night when they had grown so fragile and brittle that they shattered when he touched them, and there was nothing left in them but dust.

*   *   *

The Rapanuian and the Rungarungawan are in the engine room of the
Tanets
. They are sitting face to face. Both have their hands on the book with no words. One has his eyes closed and the other is speaking very quietly. This is about death, says the one with his eyes open. You can see this coming and so can I. But
we
are not about death. We are about living. That is why we are together. That is what happened to us. Neither of us sought what came to us but it did and it is the very opposite of death. We are about living. We are about joy. We are not the children of the eyeless ones. We are the very opposite of the eyeless ones. That is why we are sworn together. That is what we are about. You know this and so do I. We can stop that man’s imminent action or we can leave the ship before it happens. But we can only stop him with the tools that he uses. We can only stop him if we are violent. But we are sworn against violence. We can only be who we are. He must be who he is. Today he is a child of the eyeless ones. He might awaken to his next self but we cannot force that to happen. That is what we swore not to do. We vowed not to force things to be what we thought they should be but rather be open to them and allow them to be what they inarguably are. That is who we swore to be. So we must leave the ship. We must step away and let things happen as they will happen. We are sworn to be examples and not agents. So we must leave. We can swim. We can hold each other. We are together. The two of us are one.

Let us pray, said the other man, and they both sat silent holding the book for a few minutes, their eyes closed.

I feel that an island is coming soon, perhaps an hour, said the Rapanuian, and he folded the book into a blue cloth and slipped it into a waterproof bag. The Rungarungawan waited until the book was safe and then he kissed each of the Rapanuian’s eyes and the Rapanuian kissed each of the Rungarungawan’s eyes and they went up on deck, the Rapanuian carrying the book as carefully as you would carry a baby.

*   *   *

Declan wakes up slowly in his bunk. His left arm says about time you awoke so I can get some things off my chest. I am
snapped in half
. What were you thinking, drinking? Did we not, as coherent body parts, all make a decision months ago to cease and desist with the drinking? Has anything good
ever
come from drinking? Have we ever not been battered bruised and broken as a result of drinking? Have we not seen through the ostensibly social veneer of drinking and perceived the inherent and incipient darkness of the habit? I speak for the fingers and toes and nose and ears and wrists and collarbone and even one
eye
socket when I say that drinking has never been
remotely
a productive enterprise in the least whatsoever for us and you
know
this which is why we all agreed to desist months ago. It’s no good saying you forgot. We all know this is not true. Nor can you plead a broken heart or the urge to suppress great bodily or emotional pain and trauma. The fact is that you lost your temper and you lost your compass and this is
not
acceptable to the parts of the body that in concert compose you. You yourself appealed to us to help you in this matter and we have worked hard for months now to make that happen. Again I speak for the other parts of the body when I say we are
very
disappointed by what happened and we certainly hope it will not happen again. You can well imagine how particularly disappointed I am, having been
snapped in half
by an ostensibly accidental fall after drinking. I do not think we have unreasonably high expectations for you. We have been with you from the beginning. We have always served with a will. We were all in it together. But you still do stupid things deliberately. We have no idea why. And the stupidest of all is to do the very thing that you know and we know will only bring turmoil and trouble. Not to mention significant and nearly fatal injury. That was very nearly the
end
of us last night. In a sense we are very lucky indeed to come away from last night with only me
snapped in half
. Do I sound a little bitter? Well, I am not thrilled about being halved but I will accept the blow if you promise us to stop drinking. You know and we know that cannot end well, and there is
so
much ahead of us. We cannot get there without you and you cannot get there without us. We are your crew, Declan. And you wouldn’t casually place your crew in danger, would you? You wouldn’t carelessly put your crew in harm’s way. In fact you would do everything in your power to
protect
your crew. Not just from a sense of responsibility, but because of your character. Look, we have no illusions about the mistakes you have made but we also have no illusions about the quality of your character. We have known you all your life. We have seen the growth and defiant courage. The fact is that you are a good man with every hope and expectation of being a great man, if you marshal your undeniable tools and talents. Now,
I
have no idea what it is you will be at your apex, I am just your left arm, but you know I am right, and you owe it to yourself to be the best man you can be. Well, that’s all I have to say, and it’s probably time to be up and about. It’s after dawn, and there’s a
lot
to be done.

*   *   *

Think of the Impacific Ocean not as a place but as a language, said the minister to the tall thin nurse, who had asked him about his work, and then been so startled by the cheerful river of his talk that she had to sit down to catch it as it poured forth.

Everyone who lives here speaks this language, he continued, and the language influenced who we are, and how we act, and how we think, and how we see and smell and hear and savor the world. So if we all speak the same language, and we all have a certain mindset and heartset about our lives that came from this ancient language influencing how we developed, and we all live
in
this language, on the tops of hills in the huge sprawl of the language, then we are a nation, isn’t that so? Isn’t that what a nation
is,
a coherent region where people gather under a certain set of ideas by which to live their lives? Now, some of those ideas are easy to see, like the color of your skin or what name you call God, but some of those ideas are
not
so easy to see, like how long your tribe was in that one place, or what war deep in the past gave you a story under which to claim that place, or what new ideas led to a new story under which to live there. And some ideas are very hard to see because of the miles involved. This is the case with our Impacific Ocean nation, I believe. But once some of us see that we actually
are
a nation, the nation of Pacifica, then we can start to
talk
about it, and believe it, and the more people who handle an idea, the more the idea becomes a place to live your lives. Do you see what I mean? So even this conversation, in which you entertain the idea of the nation of Pacifica, means that the nation just grew in population by one person. It doesn’t even matter right now if you
believe
in the idea of the nation of Pacifica; it just matters that the idea is
in
you now, taking up residentialness. Ideas are like seeds and they grow some places and not others, but you have to scatter the seeds everywhere so they have a chance. So that is what I do. I am the seed scatterer. I do not own this idea. I am not the boss of the idea. I am just an agent of the idea. I am the first ambassador for Pacifica. I think it is a true idea and that the more people who receive the seed the more people will think about how we could be a very interesting nation, the nation of Pacifica, and the more people who think about it, the more likely it is to be born. And how often are new nations born? Not so often. It seems like a good idea to me that a new nation would be born, especially here where there never was a nation before, and other nations came and took what they wanted and left nothing for the people who stayed here after the other nations left. We could be a new nation unlike any other nation that ever was, too. That would be excellent. We could be a new kind of nation that never has a war, for example. Maybe we could be a kind of nation that invents new ways to solve problems. We are already a nation with the most remarkable volume and sun and range and amount of salt water and countless numbers of beings many of which we do not even know what species they are, but maybe we could also be the most inventacious nation there ever was. Maybe inventingness would be our National Product. That could certainly be. So everyone would want to get some of our inventingness. We could export
that
. We could import problems and export solutions that we invented. That could be. That could most
certainly
be.

*   *   *

Pipa had dark days. Sure she did. How could she not? She had dark
weeks
. How could she not? But something always flittered up and she could not stay down there in the dark. She had no words for how this was. It just was. It was some irrepressible bone at the bottom of her bones. Sometimes she tried to put a name or a shape on it but the name or shape would never stick and even when she was little she knew trying to name the bone was only a mask. It just was. There were no rules for its rising. Sometimes she would fall silent for hours, swimming in a darkness she could never imagine ever lifting ever again and could never have explained even if she had a voice with which to try to scream it, and then the irrepressible bone would rise up and the darkness would recede like a tide. It was like the darkness was afraid of the bone. Sometimes music drew the bone up to her surface. Sometimes birds. Sometimes angles and corners of light. Sometimes the way someone held her. Sometimes the gleam of a coin in her father’s beard. She learned to trust the bone. It could not be called or summoned or controlled or bent to her will but when it came it came thoroughly and effortlessly without sign or signal and when it came the darkness shrank away and fell away thoroughly as if cowed and defeated. The darkness always came back. Sure it did. How could it not? But after a while she knew in her bones that it would not stay forever, and that up would rise something with raw defiant snarling joy in it, and that that would be a door opening to an ocean of light, and when this happened she was overcome with silent wriggling laughter, and shot through with some kind of electric wriggle that made her fingers flutter and flicker and her voice leap out thrilled even in its motley tatters and shreds, its halt and stammer of music; and there were times when what she heard herself saying was not the sputtered mewing and mewling that other people heard when she opened her mouth, but songs in languages of their own, music that used her as its instrument, not so much broken as newly shaped, shaped in a way the music had never traveled before; so that in the rare times even now when she tried to explain the bone in the bottom of her bones to herself, she would think of it as music that had to be sung somehow, and had chosen her, battered shattered Pipa, for its delivery. Why this would be so she could not understand, but that it
was
so was inarguable, and that it
was
so, she often thought, was the strangest and most amazing of gifts she had ever received.