Playground, page 21
And to his amazement, no one objected. The only response came from Kinipela Temauri, who leapt to her feet and shouted, “Yes!” She fist-bumped her father and hugged his ample belly, to general laughter and applause. Then everyone in the ring stood up to go, and Makatea’s month of collective deliberation began.
........
RAFI AND I WEREN’T THE ONLY serious students in our dorm. But most of the better ones moved out after the required two semesters. We two lived on in that shoebox for three more years, long after every other self-respecting pre-professional decamped to more luxurious off-campus housing. Our miniature, minimalist HQ suited us. The more constrained and featureless our living quarters, the more it focused us.
Those were the early years of the Third Industrial Revolution. We’d studied the First Industrial Revolution, the Age of Steam, together back at Saint Ignatius, in AP history. Rafi had fallen in love with the art and literature of the Second Industrial Revolution, the cultural earthquake of High Modernism that accompanied the Age of Electricity. Now I was joining the revolution that I’d sided with since childhood, the one that was disrupting everything we took for granted: the Age of READY >_.
Somewhere between our freshman and senior years, the magic boxes went from exotic toys to necessities. Rafi bought his first rig, and I got one that I could toss in a bag and carry around with me. Only twelve pounds: I could code while sitting in the shade of an oak on the Quad. It astounded everyone, even my techie friends.
Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution. Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.
IN THE FALL OF our senior year, when the sweet gums turned burgundy, the maples went lemon and orange, and the oaks all over campus settled into shades of scarlet, when the daylight hours shrank and the air thickened with that sere, weird scent of anticipation, Rafi came back to our dorm room late one afternoon with an announcement. He smiled his most serene and philosophical smile, with his tongue in the slight gap between his two front teeth.
“I’ve just met the woman I am going to marry.”
I laughed. “Congratulations. I think?” I didn’t credit his announcement for an instant. The Bayesian priors—his track records—weren’t especially good. He’d had girlfriends off and on over the previous three years, even ones for whom he’d asked me to vacate the dorm on a Saturday night. But his enthusiasms always went from crazy love to jaded disillusionment in a matter of months. So even though the word marriage rocked me, his threat had no credibility.
“Does she know this yet?”
“Silence, exile, and cunning, man. I gotta sneak up on her.”
“With your tachometer? Good luck.”
“She’s a first-year grad student in the School of Art. Born in Micronesia. Grew up all over the Pacific. Get this: she never stepped foot on a continent until a few months ago.”
“Whoa, Rahrah. A Pacific Islander? They’re, like . . . half a percent of the world’s population. I’ve never even seen one. When do I get to meet her?”
He froze me with a look from across the narrow gap between his bed and my desk. “That’s fucked up, brother. You’re a disgusting piece of work.”
“What are you talking about? What’d I say?”
“You want to see her tattoos? You want her to show you her carved war canoe while she dances you some hula?”
“Jesus, Rafi. What is wrong with you?”
“ ‘I’ve never even seen one?’ Take your sick fetishes elsewhere.”
Ina Aroita had not yet been in our lives for one full day, and already she changed everything.
“All right. Guilty as charged. So what’s to love?”
He got that expression again, like he was looking out over two thousand horizons, laid end to end. “She is . . . utterly fearless. Everything is art, to her. I always thought that a person had to choose between safety and freedom. This woman is not letting anyone make her choose anything. She . . . she could teach me a thing or two.”
HE INTRODUCED ME. The three of us went bowling in the basement of the Union. It was the most fun I’d had in public since childhood. The woman floored me. She reminded me of someone, and it wasn’t until the seventh frame of our first game that I realized who it was: the famous bust of Nefertiti, minus the headgear. She was short—maybe five feet two in bowling shoes—but she never stopped dancing. She leaned in and did this little thing with her wrists and forearms to try to steer her ball and keep it from going into the gutter. When she succeeded in nicking a pin or two, her victory pirouette was Bolshoi-worthy.
When she and Rafi talked, I was mystified. They shared some private, allusive language filled with cultural references that left me convinced that the Jesuits had failed to educate me. Rafi: I’d never seen him so at ease or at home with anyone. No put-ons or put-downs or jive talk or funny accents. Just Rafi, open and unashamed, in all his lit-nerd glory. Of course, I was jealous.
Ina made a secret note of our shoe sizes that afternoon. The following Saturday, she rented three pairs of Rollerblades and took us on a wild ride across four square miles of campus. I hit the pavement three times in less than an hour, and I didn’t care. I didn’t even mind when the two of them, chattering together in their secret fine arts language, sped on like two Olympians and left me half a block behind, flailing to keep upright. Ina slipped through the air like she was swimming, and my best friend paced her, laughing and smitten, as ecstatic as a kid who just aced the final question in God’s quiz show.
He must have told her that I needed caretaking, because they adopted me as their mascot. Sometimes on weekends we went to cult movies that the two of them loved and that bored me to tears. Ina took us to the marble-clad art museum—the “whited sepulchre,” as Rafi called it—and showed us how to dance in our minds with a painting that looked like food stains on an old work shirt. The thing would have incensed me as fraudulent had I come across it a month before meeting her. Now it became a mirror, a weird cousin to play with, a thing that offered up a meaning that wasn’t mine until I looked closer.
IN HER PRESENCE, Rafi became a whole new person—nimble, witty, vulnerable, open. For the first time since I’d met him, he had a real dog in life’s fight. I watched him charm and tease and debate her, and I saw him come into his own. With her, there was no more Great Black Hope. No dead sister. No abusive and unappeasable father. He was working for himself at last. Staking out his right to enjoyment. Playing in the world.
Maybe I seemed different to him as well, tagging along awkwardly in their wake, making my goofy math jokes, a beat behind and outclassed by the worldliness that Ina brought to the party. She breathed new life into our stalled friendship, giving us new instances of one another to explore. And she was liquid confidence and fresh eyes to both of us. The three of us, together, became invincible.
I remember her saying once, “Where I come from, the artists came first and all the gods followed.”
I could never quite follow her, and it made me nervous. “Okay, fine. But what does that mean, exactly?”
Rafi smiled at my anxiety but did not mock me. “Don’t worry, Toddy. We got you. It means love and do whatever you want.”
Ina wagged her finger in the air. “It means the artists made the gods!”
Ina was especially good at that. For a few months of our shared lives, she made gods out of all three of us.
I DON’T KNOW WHEN I fell in love with her. Right away, probably. But it didn’t feel wrong or painful. I was thrilled for Rafi. I was thrilled for myself. It occurred to me that I’d never before seen my friend truly happy, except perhaps when he was marking up a volume of Rilke or beating me at Go. He was himself with this woman. He no longer had to prove anything to anyone. She made him feel like the game of life was won simply by playing it.
Ina had her own apartment on the third floor of a partitioned-up old American Gothic in West Urbana. Rafi started spending nights over there in early October. By Halloween he was a regular tenant. As fall went on, I felt abandoned, a senior in a dorm filled with noisy and very green underclassmen.
One crisp Saturday in late October, we introduced Ina to German board games. She struggled with the complex rules, but the novelty of calculating odds and fighting it out with the boys kept her at the table for hours, until we were too stiff to stand up. She got cross with Rafi for the way he played.
“Hey, fella. You’re not making your own best moves. You’re just trying to stick it to Todd!”
“Sticking it to Todd is my own best move.”
“We call it the Young strategy,” I explained. “It’s what has kept the two of us together all these years.”
“Hmm New game, then. For all of us. And I’m making the rules.”
And she did. For a while, the two of us played every game she invented.
THE SCULPTURE GREW BEYOND HER CONTROL.
She added to the few pieces of plastic that she and her daughter found inside the belly of the dead albatross until there were enough to form into a sinuous double-arc of glued-together shards that now stood taller than the little girl. Ina had no idea what the assemblage was trying to become—only that it wouldn’t stop unfolding. She could feel with her arms and hands where each new piece of petrochemical flotsam wanted to go. But beyond that, she worked blind, in the way of a waking dream.
She harvested new pieces for the growing sculpture whenever she was out. On her way to the Chinese store, she saw a cracked cadmium spray bottle that had blown across the path, and she stashed it away in her shopping carry. A tangle of torn filament and fishing floats that washed up near Patrice and Puoro’s moorings caught her eye, and she waded out at low tide to retrieve it and add it to the monster growing in her yard.
As the sculpture grew, Ina hunted more deliberately for bright pieces that would fit into the accreting shape. When she and Hariti scavenged the beach for shells and pretty stones, she kept an eye out for synthetic bits, surprised that she now thought of them as pretty.
It surprised her, too, to realize how many trinkets of trash washed up on the island every day. She’d always ignored them or wished them away. On the lookout now, she found them everywhere.
She went to her husband Rafi.
“How about a family hike and picnic Sunday, after church?”
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s walk to Hawaii.”
NEITHER INA NOR RAFI ever believed that the universe was guided by an agent that had their welfare at heart. But both the children were crazy about the idea, and on an island of eighty-two people, almost all of them religious, churchgoing had its rewards. The singing, for one, always did a number on Ina. They went to the Catholic church one week and the Mormon Sanito church the next. It made them popular with both congregations, who vied for their loyalty.
“Is it the same God?” a troubled Afa asked his father that Sunday, after the Catholic service.
“With different capes,” Rafi told his boy.
Ina slugged her husband in his thin upper arm and petted her son. “Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.”
“What about my heart?” Rafi pouted, rubbing his bruised bicep. His son broke from his mother’s arms to comfort him.
“I said human.”
The children looked away in disgust as their parents began to coo and bill at each other like Makatea fruit doves in the mating season.
THEY HEADED OUT to find a picnic spot. Rafi loved a good foot expedition. Right up there with playing area-control games with his son or worker-placement games with the kids at school, and just below studying centuries-old Go matches with Wen Lai, walking was now his great pastime.
“Want to walk cross-island?”
Afa shouted, “Yes!” There were crabs up on the plateau. They only came out at night, but a boy could always hope.
Ina hid her plan from the boys. “Let’s walk the beach up to Temao. We can head clockwise around the coast and lunch somewhere fun along the way.”
“Are you joking? It’s twelve miles, all the way around.”
“We don’t have to go all the way around. When we get to Moumu, we can cut back across on the road.”
Still several miles. Rafi pulled a skeptical face. “Okay? But you’re treating the blisters when we get home.”
Ina gave everyone a pillowcase. “Fill them with any pieces of plastic you find along the way.” Rafi raised his eyebrows but set to work. Hariti loved any kind of treasure hunt, and this one had the hopeless idealism that most appealed to her. But Afa soon started to grumble at the chore of picking up trash.
His father asked to see his sack. “How many colors you got there?”
“Green, red, clear—is clear a color?”
“Clear is the wildest of all colors, my man.”
“Green, red, clear, white, blue, brown, yellow . . . and weirdos.”
“Great. That’s eight kinds. I’ll race you. By the end of the day, whoever has the most of the fewest of those colors gets half an hour of backrub.”
The boy tapped his head, trying to decode those victory conditions. But once he figured it out, he was off and running, finding plastic everywhere and shouting in victory at every discovery. It thrilled him to turn up a bright yellow rubber duck bath toy, stuck in some beachgrass up above the high tide line.
Rafi held out his hand. “Let’s see.”
Reluctantly, his son handed over the prize toy.
“I’ve read about this. Tens of thousands of them tumbled off a container ship in the middle of a storm years ago. Been washing up on beaches everywhere, ever since.”
Afa reached out to take the duck back. Rafi high-fived him. “Collector’s item, man!”
“Sweet!” Ina declared. “Perfect for the sculpture.”
“No! I’m keeping it!” The boy took it back and thanked the ocean with a shout.
With the advance scouts down the beach filling their sacks, Rafi put his hand around his wife’s waist and matched her barefoot pace.
“So how are we handling this referendum?”
“Handle?”
“Every resident of the island who can write their own name. That includes both kids. This little family officially controls five percent of the say over Makatea’s future. It might decide the vote.”
Ina stopped and looked out at sea. “Holy shit.”
“I mean, do we coach them? Do we just tell them how to vote?”
“Tell them what? I don’t even know how I’m going to vote! Do you?”
He craned back and assessed her. “Serious?”
“I’m sorry, Rafi. I really don’t know. I can’t even tell you what seasteading is. Is it the way forward? Will it help to solve . . . ? I have no idea. Maybe it’s the next Internet.”
“Ina!” His voice was tight. “Even if this were a referendum on continuing the Internet, I’d vote no.”
“Why.”
She had a way of saying why that he loved with all his heart. More statement than question. Intelligent, clear-eyed, curious, noncombatant, already reconciled to any answer. She’d given the word that note since their first winter together at Illinois. And he’d never once told her how it beguiled him.
“Because. . . .” He waved his hand toward the line where the pale azure of the fringing reef changed to the cobalt of the deeper water just past it. He drew his palm in a great circle, taking in the ocean on the other side of the island. “This place. . . . think of the scars. When we first came here, to be with these beautiful kids . . . I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it. I was so juked up on everything that the human world inflicted on me. But here, there was just . . . this.” He stared at the cliffs and the surf and the rocky beach as if for the first time.
“It took me about six months to detox. Systemic FOMO. I couldn’t concentrate, this place was so quiet. And then . . .”
She put her ear to his clavicle. She could never get enough of listening to what his heart sounded like, when he got worked up.
“Now I think: there are ten thousand little spots like this that the continents can’t reach, little outposts of sanity. These folks. . . .” He waved over his shoulder toward Vaitepaua and the seventy-eight other people who were now his whole world. “They’re like the inhabitants of a Dark Ages monastery, keeping literacy alive. And now the Outside is coming for them again.”
Ina Aroita pulled away as gently as she could. “Rahrah? What if that’s condescension? I mean, not that you mean . . .”
He looked stung, but he didn’t spin out into a funk. Age and the island had cured him of that impulse. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a real fight. She could say almost anything to him now, and given a few moments, he’d thank her for her honesty.
Rafi started back up the beach, where Afa and Hariti were joining forces to dig a five-gallon plastic jug out of the water-worn gravel. “Okay. Tell me how it’s condescending.”
“What if most people here think the proposal is great? What if the island wants it? Meaningful work, fair compensation, the chance to be part of something larger. Healthy, educated kids and grandkids with more future than they have now. Don’t you think our friends have the right to all those things? Maybe most of Makatea doesn’t want to be . . . monks in your monastery.”
