Island
He feels the light before he sees it. Hot. So very hot. It takes great effort to crack one eye open, and even then he has to squint. Thinks, for an absurd moment, or maybe only a second, that heaven really shouldn't be this warm. But once his eyes focus, the swaying of leaves come into view, the blinking shade of the canopy above him blocking out the light, letting it in, blocking it out, letting it in, blocking it out, letting it in. He's lying on soft grass, a few bits of tree bark digging into his shoulder blades. He's wet. Which he supposes is to be expected. At least he knows he hasn't been unconscious for too long here.
Where is here?
Home, home, home.
The words echo. But it's just the ringing of his ears, the world tilting. His head is swimming when he finally struggles up onto one elbow. There are birds chirping above him, the faint lulling sound of a shore nearby. The trees are overhanging, full and long limbed but not clustered together at the trunks. He's lying in a circular patch of land. He stands, surveys the area, the small stream nearby, the tangled vines, the high grass.
Follows the sound of the beach.
-------
There he finds the remains of his boat. It's a small metal lifeboat, of the same variety seen on almost every merchant fishing ship. In its current condition - the sides of it are ripped away, like a roach stripped of its wings - he won’t get very far. But it looks fixable. But.
He hadn't been alone. Two other fishermen had abandoned ship for the lifeboat, once it became clear that they were taking on water far too fast to survive. But they’re nowhere to be found.
His knife is still hooked in the back of his pants. There's obviously fresh water, wood, food. He can look for his missing crewmates while he repairs his boat. He'll be out of here in a few days. Right? Right.
------
It's taking longer than he expected. Traversing the jungle is surprisingly distracting. He finds himself staring for hours at the stream, watching the sprinklings of the early morning hours peppering the slow moving water. It also doesn't help that every time he returns from getting food or water or more wood, his freshly mended boat will be back in ruins. He begins wondering if there isn’t some malevolent, freak tide that surges up on land every time he leaves, only to recede back innocently when it knows he’s coming. He finds himself, more and more, glaring openly at the relatively placid ocean, suspicious, warning it to back off. Starts to wonder if it's laughing at him.
The jungle is peaceful, for the most part. Every once in awhile, it will suddenly go dark, like night has surged over the island in only a few seconds, and it rains like he has stumbled over the end of the world. When that happens, he has to stop and wait it out. There's no way around it. He can see only a few feet around him, and to walk on blindly would be stupid and pointless. It's frightening, but he's growing used to it. If he is caught by the stream, he watches the rain dashing against the water, the shadows of the trees making the splashes jump and dance like an alien light show.
It is here that he finds himself the day she appears. He's sitting against a fallen tree trunk - suddenly she's next to him, so suddenly that he isn't even surprised at first, doesn't jump or scream, merely looks at her for a moment before the rest of him catches up to the realization that she is indeed right there next to him, and then he’s scurrying back over rocks and mud, scrambling to his feet.
She's wet, wearing jeans, and a t-shirt. She has a rifle. He wants to pull out his knife but she isn't pointing the thing at him, and she looks so. . . normal.
"Did you take a wrong turn somewhere?" she asks, a small smile pulling at the side of her mouth. She has one of those smiles that looks like a cartoon. Like a large U and two smaller ones at the tips for her cheeks. Besides that, there’s nothing really extraordinary about her.
"Who are you?" he yells, trying to make his voice carry over the downpour.
"Ellen!" she shouts back, still looking amused.
"Where did you come from?"
Her smile weakens, just a bit, and she looks up the sky. Her mouth moves. He can’t hear her, but he thinks she mouthed from the rain but when he repeats his question, louder, more insistent, she cups her hands around her mouth and yells, "Boston!"
------
They stay together after that. She told him that she was marine biologist, had been on a scientific expedition. There'd been a storm, and then she was here. Just like he was. "I was researching rogue waves," she tells him, "and then I was facing a wall of water. I woke up here." She shrugs after a lot of her sentences. She never helps him with the boat. She’ll merely sit and watch him, munching on a mango. Every time he makes any progress, he’ll slap his hands together and say, “See? Gonna be off any day now.”
And she’ll smile around a mouthful of fruit and say, “That’s what you said the last time.”
He starts to suspect that she doesn't really want to leave. But she’d spoken of her little girl, of her husband, of her life, and he thinks it seems impossible she'd want to stay. When he asks her do you like it here or something? her eyes light up, angry. But she never helps and he starts realizing that she maybe she just doesn't see the point.
Sometimes he catches her stumbling over her words, over her past. As if she can't remember something that she had long ago memorized. Searching her eyes for a lie, he comes up empty, though.
Maybe she's sick, he thought. Maybe she's. . . ill.
-------
Once she says something weird. "Phones didn't work very well when they were first installed, you know? And the poor didn't have them at first. I didn't get one until much later." He stops what he's doing, reaching for some fruit, straddling a high thick tree branch, and gazes down at her where she is cleaning her rifle.
"What are you talking about? You're not old enough to remember the first phones."
She gives him a strange look, as if he's the one talking crazy. "I know", she replies.
"Then why are you talking like that? You’re 30, from Boston. What's wrong with you?"
Her eyes light up again, and she turns and storms off. He sees her again that night when she brings him water to the beach. She sits with him next to the fire and apologizes. "I get a little mixed up," she explains, "I think I've been too alone for too long". She isn't lying. The fire, orange and soft, casts a sketchy outline of light on her face. She tries to get up and leave after that but he grabs her arm, searches her face, and comes up with nothing but confusion and uncertainty. She isn't lying.
He really does think she's ill.
-------
One night, he awakes to her talking in her sleep. Spanish or Latin words, he can't quite tell. Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis, omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.
He doesn’t' wake her. Lies there, staring up at the stars, listening to her.
The next day, while picking up wood twigs dry enough to burn, he asks her, conversationally, "So, you speak any other languages or anything, Ellen?"
"Does pig-latin count?"
He laughs.
And then she stands, stares off in the distance with her arms full of bits and pieces of trees, as if searching her mind for the answer. He finds himself the same way, simply standing, waiting, staring at her profile, watching the trees swinging back and forth, her face changing in the pendulum shade and he thinks that maybe he's looking at more than one woman. He's transfixed at the sight.
So much so that when she finally shakes her head and smiles that sweet smile of hers at him, he doesn't know what she's answering when she says, "Nope. Just the one."
-------
He dreams of her one night. It’s dark in the jungle and the moon reaches through the swaying trees like a spotlight. It makes an arch into the distance, back by the river where they met, and he sees her. The light trails over her for just a moment. She’s dead eyed and unmoving, merely standing there. Then she’s gone.
He woke to her poking him with a stick, telling him breakfast was ready.
She never tries to touch him. Seems to go out of her way to avoid it. When she accidentally falls asleep at his shoulder, she wakes with a start, eyes frantic. She always talks about her husband then, her little girl. Then other things, random and disconnected and seemingly snatched out of the air - the brush of her mother's hand across the cotton of her cheek as a child, the drifting sound of glass wind chimes, the smell of melted chocolate, her father’s voice reciting Latin beneath the low light of his study, her mother’s bare feet padding softly past the door. Anything to keep speaking.
And when it doesn’t make sense, when her words shimmer like distant constellations just out of reach, dancing away, she bares her teeth. When she looks away in confusion and anger, he sees pain in her eyes like the glimmer of starlight, and he has never seen pain in her before.
He never asks her about the other languages she murmurs in her sleep.
------
Then everything changes. And it all starts with falling out of a tree. She's standing there, doing something, and he's up up up on a branch, dropping fruit down to her. And then he's falling down down down. His own fault, he knows, even as the earth rushes up to meet him.
He lands on his knife. For a long time all he hears is the chirping of birds, feels warmth spreading on his side. When he struggles to his feet, he is soaked in blood, dizzy, getting cold.
Ellen is gone.
He falls again. Face down this time.
------
She's still gone when he wakes up. In perfect health. He convinces himself that he had dreamed it. That perhaps he had just hit his head on the way down and dreamed the blood and the sun and the leaves sticking to his wound. That doesn't quite explain where Ellen has gone. And he knows he hasn't dreamt her.
-----
He finds her grave a few feet away from where he fell. He stumbles over it, literally. Sits there with his legs swung over the small mound. Tries to remember when he buried her. Why he buried her.
That night in his sleep he sees the blood on his hands, dirt covering that pale face of hers. The mud and the rain and the wet dirt heavy in his tired hands.
------
After that, he starts dreaming of odd things. The glare of the sun spilling from around a half built tower, confusion and panic. Horse drawn carriages and the cold of hard wooden seats bumping over the cobblestones. Sometimes even a nice, yellow house near a bay, foggy and calm and peaceful, not anything like the bay of California, where he was from.
He wonders if he's growing ill too. Still can't remember how she died. Whenever he awakes now, he has to take a moment to remember where he is, who he is. Assemble the pieces. Push the dreams away. They aren't real memories. They aren't real.
------
He wakes up once, in the middle of the night. Thinks he has heard something in the distance. Realizes it's himself, speaking in his sleep - Nos mémoires dorment sur le bord d'un couteau. He doesn't know French. Does he? The thick residue of foreign tongues coats his mouth, fuzzy and sticky. He doesn't blink. Can't blink. Stares up at the black sky and tries not to cry. Where is he?
Home, home, home.
This time, the words are inside him.
------
He finds another grave about a week later. He's further inland than he's ever been. But he has taken to traveling more now. Feels a strange pulling that's making him stay, loiter. His boat hasn't been worked on in weeks. Somewhere inside himself, he knows he is never leaving.
When he stumbles over this new grave, he grows angry. None of it makes any sense. Unless Ellen hadn't been alone when she landed here. She never said. It was hard enough getting a story from her that made sense anyway.
He begins digging. Something is calling to him, from outside, from inside, and he knows it is the key to something, whatever is in this grave. It takes hours, the soil is wet and muddy and it has started to rain that black, deathly rain that sometimes overtakes the whole island. But he keeps on.
It's Ellen.
He fingers the hair, the familiar clothes. She's been dead for quite some time.
Much longer than the four weeks he's been here.
He falls on his back. Ignores the water going up his nose, into his eyes. The ground is trembling, the earth shaking. But the earth isn’t shaking - his body is, his own tears surging through him. He closes his fists so tight that blood seeps through his fingers. He falls asleep, or unconscious, and dreams of burying himself. Of his hands, small and feminine and then large and calloused. Bending and lifting. Bending and lifting. The wet mud slipping through his fingers. Sees his own face, eyes open and vacant, looking up from a hole in the dirt as he covers it, pushing the earth back onto himself.
Feels the phantom sear of a knife in his side.
_______
They landed on the island after a storm. Their lifeboat was still filled with air, in good condition. They had water and backpacks and seemed in good spirits. There were two of them. He came with the rain one day. Walked up behind them. Ellen's rifle slung over his shoulder.
He smiled. Laughed at their shocked expressions.
"Did you take a wrong turn somewhere?"