Playground, page 24
Ina said nothing as Rafi disappeared into his edits. She had asked to see his innermost place, and this was it. Rafi, at twenty-two, bent over the paper, fixing the deficient words, changing and changing, even after reading their perfection to us. He edited them as patiently as he’d edited himself. He spoke head bowed, addressing the page.
“Toddy had like a million things we were supposed to know about him and his machine. Een had five. I feel like a slacker, with only two. First: I am working to revise some early lessons. Second: That takes a lot of drafts. Fortunately, I do enjoy keeping the game going.”
“That’s three things,” I said.
He set the pen back down on the desk and looked up. In a goofy, cartoon voice, he said, “A th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”
“Rafi,” Ina said.
He heard the pleading in her voice. His own voice turned earnest, trying to interpret and to forestall, which I suppose comes to the same thing.
“It’s the first mystery of my existence: That to get their revenge on a culture that’s killing them, my parents pushed their child into a place that they themselves can never understand. Poetry, for God’s sake. They got what they wanted, but now they want the old me back.”
“Rafi,” Ina said again. She slid off the desk and stepped toward the chair. Involuntarily, he put up his palms in self-defense. She took his hands in hers, held them down to her side, and kissed him. He kissed her back, amazed. Neither of them cared that I was standing right there.
The kiss went on, motionless and exploratory, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I eased myself out of the cramped room, opening and closing the door with its frosted window, and neither of them heard me leave. I threaded my way back through the maze of shelving and down to level five and the bookstacks exit. I waited for an eternity on the other side of the turnstile.
When the two of them came out at last, they looked flushed, happy, and more than a little nonchalant. Rafi spied me sitting on my haunches against the wall, outside the exit.
“Mr. Keane, I presume.”
Something about our friendship had changed. And something much diminished was growing up in its place. The three of us went down the double-height flights of stairs to street level. Outside, the cold air smelled glassy and metallic. Winter on the prairies.
We went to a Korean restaurant in Campustown. The things we were not to talk about were as clear as if he’d spoken the prohibition out loud. Instead, the early dinner conversation was filled with insipid chatter. Ina described what sea slugs tasted like. Rafi explained why he would always be a Cubs fan, hoping without hope, the masochism of each new season. I was done with them both and couldn’t wait for the meal to be over so that I could go back to the NCSA and be with CRIK.
But when I made to go, Rafi wouldn’t let me.
“No, you don’t, friend. Did you forget that we’re going to see Willy the Shake?” He had gotten us tickets to that night’s student performance of The Tempest. “Greatest play ever written by a dead white dude.”
THE PERFORMANCE WAS ATHLETIC. Characters and words and books and magic spells and hopes, fears, dreams, and crazy untamable desires were flying around the stage, hitting various targets and sending them careening. For the first time, the penny dropped, and I realized why we call them plays. I sat there in the middle of the most amazing dungeon crawl, watching the adventure unfold as if the dice were still being cast.
I was mostly lost. The story seemed to be about a hermit wizard of great powers who has taken over the island of his banishment, and when outsiders land, he plays out the finale of a vast and patient game for his own artistic purposes. Halfway through the play, the tortured monster Caliban, who has a strange S&M relationship with the wizard, comes out onstage and reassures his fellow revolutionaries with whom he is plotting a coup that if they hear things in their heads, it’s all magic and they shouldn’t be afraid. It’s just the wild island talking, and all the sounds are more enjoyable than dangerous.
You tell me. You’re the one who’s read everything ever written.
As the tortured slave creature spoke those words, Ina, the island girl, sitting between us, let loose with a tremendous sob and grabbed both our hands. I had no idea why. You, on the other hand, can probably make the connection in whatever passes in you for a heartbeat. The island really is singing. And the song really is good. It only sounds terrifying to us humans.
Ina’s sob echoed through the theater. It embarrassed us both, and Rafi tried to hush her. But she cried through the rest of the play. When the spell broke and the play ended, she was wrung out. She didn’t want to leave the empty room. Her eyes looked rubbed with salt. It had been some day.
Rafi and I walked her home across campus and into the cold, square residential blocks that so disoriented her. Some of the houses were lit with strings of Christmas lights, which she marveled at as if they were bioluminescent deep-sea creatures. She stopped to regard the cloud-streaked moon, a gray squirrel shooting up a tree, a crow settling to roost, as if she had never seen anything like them before.
Increasingly foulmouthed, she kept cursing the cold. “How do you fucking live here? This place isn’t fit for human habitation.” Rafi and I wedged up on either side of her, trying to warm her while still walking. The three of us, moving through that frigid night, and the isle full of noises.
Then: “Would you look at that? Look at that! You stupid shits!” It took us too long to figure out what she was talking about. It was too ordinary a thing for us midwestern boys to notice. “Why didn’t you tell me about snow?”
ON HER DOORSTEP, she hugged me to her and kissed my earlobe. Rafi, too, in his puffed-up coat and knit elf’s cap, uncharacteristically clapped me on the back and wished me a merry Christmas. But it meant the night was over, they were going upstairs to finish it together, and I was banished.
I headed back to the dorm alone, then up to Evanston by myself two days later, for more picture puzzles with my mother. Later that holiday break, while I was putting in a piece of bluish steam coming out of the train engine smokestack in Monet’s The Gare Saint-Lazare, I had the brainstorm that would shape the rest of my life and earn me my first hundred million dollars.
IN THE SPRING, Rafi moved out of the dorm and into Ina’s equally tiny apartment. Full of final projects, my semester passed in a flash. I saw little of them. We did celebrate graduation together, me with my BS in computer science and Rafi with his degree in creative writing, Ina presiding as toastmaster to us both. Our parents did not come down.
We each decided to stay at Illinois, Rafi to be with Ina and pursue a master’s degree in American literature, and I to form a little start-up and realize my brainstorm. We rarely crossed paths. The one time that felt most like old times—with Rafi and me both dipping joyfully into the old playbook—turned out to be the meeting that would kill our friendship for good.
THE THREE OF US remained in that endless cornfield for two and a half more years. Rafi and Ina grew more inseparable with each passing month, more inclined to hole up and see no one. I didn’t know what was really happening to them until too late—too late to avert the disaster or even understand it.
My island girl. My tormented friend. They should have ended up together.
SHE LOVED WOMEN.
That fact made Evelyne’s thirty-six-year-old heart beat hard.
It was, in retrospect, a most obvious discovery. Not even a discovery, really—more of an acquiescence. Obvious, and yet a total shock. The shock of that shock made her thirty-six-year-old heart beat harder.
Had it been a different year and she a different person, she might have started her life over. But it was 1971, and she was Evelyne Beaulieu Mannis, married to the world’s most gentle and accommodating man. She had two children who looked to her to protect them from a world that neither child understood. And she still had a mother in her sixties, a status-conscious woman living in a bygone age. Evie could not humiliate or hide from her.
Above all, Evelyne had her career. Against all odds, she’d worked her way into a field she shouldn’t have been able to break into, a life that she was made for, in a profession run by standards-maintaining men who would exile her at the first hint of impropriety.
Maybe if she was devious; maybe if she could sneak and hide. Maybe if she loved one single woman, and not a mix of several. But even then, she would not have known how to leap from her solid and rewarding existence into the terrifying unknown. She loved women. But there were all kinds of things she loved and could not have. Best to have the things that already overwhelmed her with their amplitude, the things she already could never exhaust. She had the ocean. And the ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement, all her panic and pain and love, into a place far larger than anything human.
THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS picture magazine asked her to dive off Truk Atoll, a thousand miles north of New Guinea. The editors wanted her to explore the war machines destroyed in Operation Hailstone, one of the Pacific War’s biggest battles. She was to take pictures with a new underwater camera and write up her impressions of the immense graveyard, submerged for almost thirty years. Few divers had explored that sunken cemetery. An article by her with state-of-the-art photos would bring the wrecks into millions of living rooms.
Evelyne was fond of the yellow-covered magazine. The French edition had fed her hunger for adventure when her family’s ideas of an exotic expedition had been driving to Mont Tremblant. She and her little brother Baptiste used to stare for hours at the magazine’s pictures of garish rain forest frogs. Its coverage of Cousteau had strengthened her resolve to become a diver.
The Tektite II mission put Evelyne on the geographical society’s radar. They came after her with a proposal: You dive and take pictures of the underwater astonishments. We’ll take pictures of your long, trim body in its wet suit, complete with its mermaid flippers. The deal was innocent enough, for the early seventies. But Evelyne wrestled with it. Serious science looked askance at any writing that smacked of mass-market fluff. Publishing in the pages of a popular magazine might be professional suicide. Once her body appeared on millions of coffee tables around the world, her peers would never take her seriously again.
It took three agonized weeks for her to say yes. She hoped that a byline in that old, beloved magazine might finally convince her mother that Evelyne wasn’t just some oceangoing tramp. Also, her uncle Philippe had served on one of Canada’s few Pacific warships, the HMCS Uganda. He died the year after Operation Hailstone in Operation Inmate, a cat-and-mouse game off Truk, and his crew buried him at sea. Evelyne had only dim memories of the man, last seeing him when she was six. But she remembered well enough her mother’s nervous breakdown and the month she spent in a “rest home” following the cable of Uncle Philippe’s death. Perhaps it might give Sophie Beaulieu belated closure if a family member presided over his funeral, decades after the fact.
Leaving home for another long trip was less of a problem than it had ever been. The kids were getting older. They knew now that their mother came and went, always bringing them back shells, corals, and other treasures. Their father found his satisfactions in raising them and in the endless, unanswered questions of his own work. As his wife dove in the world’s faraway oceans, Bart Mannis set up his kingdom in a twenty-by-twenty-six-foot dry lab at Scripps. He had staked a claim to physical oceanography, using the rapid expansion of computing power to model the transfers of heat and energy flowing between water, air, and land. The great ocean engine ran the world and decided the fate of all life. Most of humanity had no idea how beholden they were to the interplay of salinity and temperature. Bart found tremendous pleasure in being part of a global community of scientists discovering how that engine worked.
When Evelyne told him that she was leaving again, a cold current passed through Limpet’s own circulatory system. The old, familiar hurt had come to feel almost proprietary, even exciting. Through his work, Limpet had learned to see all the hurt they caused each other as part of an enormous system of fluctuating currents that worked on scales too large to grasp. In their recirculating pain, he and Evelyne were united again. Even saying goodbye to her, again and again, was thick with meaning.
EVELYNE DOVE IN THE LAGOONS near Truk, unsure what she’d find. More than 250 planes and 50 ships spread across a patch of ocean bottom seventy square miles large. Most lay between fifty and two hundred feet down, no more than a mile from the mangrove-fringed shores.
Before the battle, the lagoon around the islets had been a smooth, shallow slope of sand and mud colonized by half a dozen species of algae that grew in meadows a foot high. Injecting hundreds of planes and scores of ships into this pastureland was like dropping a city down into an endless cornfield. Truk had become a series of living caves, causeways, and canyons—the largest man-made reef on the planet. The stacked decks and spiral stairways of the ships, the gun barrels and batteries, the signal bridges and chart houses, the lower decks filled with engine rooms, the passages lined with officers’ state rooms and galleys and crews’ quarters created every imaginable kind of neighborhood: hundreds of biomes where there had been just one. Even a single-person plane, with its cockpit and propellers and shattered wings, was an intricate apartment building for kinds of life that would never have gotten a foothold without the carnage.
Every time Evelyne and her partners from the magazine dove, they came across astonishment. A kelp-coated Japanese submarine lay on its portside in 125 feet of water. It had dived in haste to avoid American planes and failed to close all its valves. Everyone on board died a slow death on a craft that could no longer surface once the danger passed. Not far from the sub lay a transport loaded with trucks and tanks, each vehicle done up in living, vivid crepe as if they were floats in the Rose Bowl parade. In the officers’ mess of an auxiliary water tanker, Evelyne came across a rack of deer antlers hanging on the wall.
These haunting scenes all but wrote Evelyne’s article for her. But not until her fourth descent did she come across the wreckage that would form her centerpiece. In an area no larger than the heart of the Scripps campus, her team found a warship split down the middle nestled near an armed aircraft carrier transport, while one auxiliary ship and one cargo vessel kissed each other on a nearby sloping shelf. The whole surreal tableau was peppered with Zeros and other planes. Machine parts lay everywhere, twisted into shocking shapes, their intricate purposes now indecipherable.
Evelyne dove, trailed by the two divers who photographed her. The warm water was clear to fifty feet. She held her underwater camera in front of her as if it were a shield. Between fifty and a hundred feet, she entered a rainbow garden painted by Bonnard. She could not believe that so many different plants, animals, and in-between creatures had found their way across open ocean and colonized each custom-made spot in a matter of mere decades. It was as if the designers of the world’s greatest aquarium had gotten together and stocked their exhibits with two of everything.
The hulls and decks were so mangled by shells and collisions with the ocean bottom that Evie struggled to tell which way some ships were facing. One of the vessels lay on its side with large pieces buckled in every direction. Another of the larger battleships, repeatedly bombed and torpedoed, had shed its turrets and cranes, conning towers, funnels, antiaircraft guns, and gun directors across several hectares. Everywhere a cluster of parts landed, it spawned a new reef.
Life covered every inch of the twisted surfaces and turned them into high-rise dwellings. A brass ship’s throttle, its handle stuck to a speed that failed to save it, lay like some wild Miró sculpture caked in starfish and worms. Morays nested in the gun barrels. One ship’s crumpled mast was so coated with swirls of whip coral and anemones that it, too, branched as if alive. Troops of porcelain crabs skittered in formation. Nudibranchs slithered across bits of blasted deck as if some wedding had scattered hallucinogenic bouquets.
Evelyne felt herself swimming inside a giant glass bottle like the one her son Danny had once found in a tidal pool in La Jolla Cove. The wreckage of war had seeded the greatest nursery she’d ever seen.
She focused her dives on the carrier transport. Most of its half a dozen holds were punctured. The steep cliffsides of the hull, four hundred feet long, were encrusted with sessile animals. All around the wreck grew several dozen species of plants. She did a quick tally of corals, but lost count well before a hundred. The fish were even more various. Sharks, barracuda, trevallies, snappers, and other top predators abounded.
The colors alone defied belief. Black coral decorated the hull and visible deck. Spectral sponges in crazy numbers—silver, pallid, and alabaster—encrusted the gunwales and waved in the current. Milky glassfish patrolled the wreck’s burst holes. Clouds of nacreous pearly dartfish and blue-green chromis damselfish schooled around her, running their own investigations. The reds, burgundies, and oranges of marbled shrimp in all their stages clattered through the hidey-holes of the jumbled metal, looking like animated Christmas cards. Parrotfish, groupers, cardinalfish, gobies, two-tone darts, wrasses, blennies, scorpionfish, jellies and other cnidarians: she couldn’t begin to name all the colors.
The new camera functioned well, clicking off pictures of the constant wonders. Evelyne swam closer to the main mass of the shattered ship. She grabbed hold of the tangled cross-braces of an antenna tower. Her hand came away crawling with living things. Skirting a ruined bulkhead, she approached the rail above the gangway. She gestured for the other two divers to follow, then passed through a blast hole in the hull deeper into the wreck.
As she entered the obscurity of the enclosed staterooms below, plants and corals, creatures of the light, gave way to those that dealt in darkness. In the lower forward hold, she came across two flights of disassembled Mitsubishi fighters, and farther aft, a machine shop filled with cryptic tools and devices, their purpose no longer readable under the layers of accreting life. In one corner stood what must have been an air compressor. Pipes snaked like limbs around its cylindrical body, and its twin circular gauges looked like goggles on a robot from a dark and silent future.
