Crossings Read Free Page A

wire, just as the books have promised. This is ‘baling wire,’ and I am delighted to meet it at last. You never meet a brickbat, for instance.
    â€˜But what
is
a brickbat?’ I said, nineteen and clever, all those years ago.
    The old Marxists looked at me with scorn. But they never told me.
    The world below us stretches deep and green and blue, miles of forest and sea and mountains. We thud through the great empty sky, and the white and the blue and the dark green ignore us. The man beside me is chewing a match. He drives the plane as if it were a car, as if it were nothing, as if every day he took someone like me to the island to be killed.
    The wings go up on one side and down on the other. My stomach lurches, as if my body still cares for itself, as if it can still remember, and I am amused, as one is at a child who cries out in the dark. ‘There, there, it’s all right,’ but the child too will die, one way or another.
    Like a swallow, we come down toward the inlet. The forest rises to meet us, alerted now. The sun glints sharply through the glass and the man curses, ducks his head. I am wearing my grandmother’s wedding ring. And here we are, an insect of wood and metal, moving calmly through gentle ripples to the dock.
    Mik comes down the path to meet us. But he was not waiting. He must have heard the plane circling, but he is not waiting for us. He comes down the path now that I am on the dock. The man with the match hands out the typewriter, the Mexican basket, the suitcase.
    Mik is filthy. Unshaven. Dressed in unfamiliar khaki and great tan boots. Even his face is grimy, streaked with grease. I know. He is so like me. I know everything. He wouldn’t clean up, he wouldn’t shave, he would not come down to the dock when he heard the plane circling in the sky. How could he? If he shaved, if he cleaned up, if he came running down, it would not be me. It would be someone else. I would not have come.
    I don’t think he says anything to me. He goes ‘Hunh!’ and picks up the basket, typewriter, suitcase, managing them all easily. I don’t hear the plane leave. The world is deephued with gold from the dying sun, gathering now into navy blue shadows. We go up the dock, up the path. The stones are sharp under my elegant brown shoes. Alligator shoes, very expensive, someone gave them to me. Who? Oh yes. Barney. She said, ‘They hurt my feet.’ They hurt mine too, but I am so pleased to be wearing size five.
    My hair is long now. And I am thin. I am small and thin and elegant in expensive clothes and alligator shoes.
    Mik moves silently a little ahead of me, thick and silent, not looking back. It is time for the sun to go down. Now we are passing a large open shed. A man is working there. A Japanese. Caught in the last golden flash like a man on the stage. He straightens up, sees us, does a double-take.
    Mik laughs. His great thundering laugh.
    The first time I ever saw Mik, he did a double-take too, but then it was on purpose.
    It is comical, this double-take, as if the Japanese has meant to do it, as if he saw at a glance the joke about us. But he hasn’t meant it, he has just done it.
    We have to cross a log bridge to get to the house. And the house itself is on logs, almost in the bed of the stream, only feet away from the lagoon. It is in deep shadow now, the house. I am to learn it is in deep shadow all the time. Morning, noon, and night. From the mountains and the forest. In the lagoon, jellyfish float lazily. Like blobs of semen slowly disintegrating.
    Mik says, ‘You can’t swim there. They get on you.’
    There is tarpaulin on the floor. Bleached white. Mik must have poured gallons of Javex on it, but he says, ‘No, Dutch Cleanser.’ It is powdery beneath my shoes.
    â€˜I chunked the joint out,’ he says.
    There is a door. I can see the small dark room. But I don’t go in.
    This room has a large wooden table and a wood stove.