Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (2 page)

N
ot that any of that matters now. You know how all that worked out. At least, you know a version of it, the version I put into the book that made me famous—or, more likely, you're familiar with the celluloid version that Hollywood birthed. Neither the book nor the movie is an accurate representation of what actually happened between me and Emma, but the salient point is that all three versions—film, book, and real life—end the same way: with the two of us very much apart.

B
efore the book that made me famous, I wrote an exceedingly obscure book that was, among other things, a love letter to Emma. This was my first novel, which basically got ignored on publication and, somewhat surprisingly, remained more or less ignored even after Emma's book was published and I became famous. When my first novel came out, as far as I knew Emma was happily married. I didn't write the book with any notion of her recognizing herself and swooning and leaving her husband when she realized that after all these years she actually wanted me. I wrote the book because I still loved her and needed to write about that.

Besides, she didn't swoon and leave her husband. Her husband left her. It was pure coincidence that I published my first novel around the time that her marriage was coming apart.

The book wasn't about her, strictly speaking—it was Hollywood high-concept and very busy, featured among other things a catastrophic comet strike on the Earth, shadowy government agencies and triple-amputee domestic terrorists, exhaustive ruminations on baseball and Catholicism and cocaine, et cetera. But the female lead in the book, the love interest, was based on Emma to a degree that made it obvious to anyone who knew her. And when she read the book herself, she started showing up more often, and calling, and emailing, and sending me photos of nice places she traveled to. Basically insinuating herself into my life again, after a very, very long time, the prospect of which both delighted and terrified me.

And also confused me, given that as far as I knew she was happily married.

B
ut maybe it's better to start
in medias res.
The storyteller in me seems to think so. He's way in the back of the classroom, but he's got his hand up and he's waving it back and forth sort of frantically and squirming around in his seat. Like he really wants to be heard on this one, after going silent for so long. And he's saying to me, Start in the middle. The beginning is really of interest only to you, buddy, is what he's telling me.

This, despite the fact that the novel that made me famous, the novel based on the real-life factual experiences I'm about to break down for you with absolute honesty and forthrightness, begins at the beginning and set up camp on the
Times
best-seller list for longer than
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Nonetheless, my inner storyteller has changed his mind. He wants to start where the action starts.

The action in question being my exile to the Caribbean island, that verdant hell, and the suicide attempt that followed shortly thereafter. Again, all well but falsely documented.

Here's how it really happened.

O
ne more thing, though, before I begin in earnest. I want to make sure we're on the same page here, you and I. I want to make sure you understand that I am not rehashing news reports and online speculation for you as if you haven't heard them already. Everyone thinks that because they read Emma's book, they know what happened to bring me to that morning on the island when I tried and failed to kill myself. And everyone thinks that they know what happened when I became famous post-suicide, because my life was investigated and studied and reported on ad nauseam.

They don't know, of course. Not all of it. Not nearly all of it. But if you sit there long enough, I'll tell you all of it. The real story. The unvarnished, unsexy, meandering, directionless, embarrassing, capital-T Truth. The truth that everyone thought they wanted from me—the truth they sat on witness stands and television stages demanding—is what I offer you.

S
o how I ended up on the island was, I was with Emma on her bed, fucking her from behind, and she reached back and clawed my thigh, digging deep red rivulets that would take two weeks to heal, and I clenched my jaw against what was pretty considerable pain and fucked her harder, and suddenly she straightened up and pulled away and knelt with her face pressed against the wall over the headboard and her arms crossed over her breasts. She made terrible frightened childlike noises. She hugged herself and trembled as though she'd just woken up from a nightmare that wouldn't recede. I moved closer to her, tentative, and when I placed my hands on her shoulders she flinched, but then she let me hold her, and she continued to tremble and I asked What is it, honey, but she couldn't tell me, and her eyes were wide and searched the room, the walls and the ceiling, as though she were suddenly struck blind.

Later that night she asked me to go away. To leave the country for a few months while her divorce was finalized and she got her professional life, which she'd neglected over the last year, back in order.

I can't stay away from you if you're nearby, she said. And I need to be away from you for a while, until this is done. Until I feel like I'm standing on my own, not using you to stay upright.

I didn't want to leave her. I knew if I left she would disappear from me again. But I agreed.

And that was how I ended up renting a bright pink stucco house on the Caribbean island, sweating rum and banging on the keyboard and filling page upon page with thousands of words about Emma, while up north, on the mainland, where she was, snow fell day after day in great hoary piles, and municipalities took to suspending their environmental laws and dumping the stuff in whatever river was nearest by, damn the consequences to fish or aquatic flora or anyone unlucky enough to live downstream.

O
f course, it wasn't as though I just got on a plane the next afternoon. Several sober, reasoned, ostensibly dispassionate conversations followed the night when she panicked, during which we discussed all the very good and obvious reasons why we should take time apart. She'd be spending more of her workweeks in Washington; I usually departed for warmer climes in January and February anyway, so it just made sense. She still trailed her broken marriage like a rusty muffler dragging behind a car; I was under the water of a yearlong bender, so it just made sense. She worried she'd turn out a monster like her mother; I had a book to write, so it just made sense. She was being stalked by a mysterious figure who had burned down her house and may or may not have wanted her dead; I sometimes gave serious thought to flinging myself in front of trains and off of highway overpasses, so it just made sense. She didn't trust herself but wanted me to trust her; my blood stagnated at the mere thought of her betraying me again, so it just made sense. Her mother was cruel and crazy; my father was dead, so it just made sense.

T
o get to the island you have to take a bush plane that holds only seven passengers, one of whom sits in the co-pilot's seat. I was chatting with the pilot on the tarmac before takeoff, trying to be personable because he seemed like a nice fellow, but also because I felt strange and dangerous and did not want to seem strange and dangerous just before climbing into the guy's plane. I did such a good job of appearing normal that the pilot invited me to sit up front with him, where the views of the rain forest were just remarkable, he said, no matter how many times he flew this route he never got over the beauty, and he was glad for that, for his inability to become inured to it, and he wanted to share it with me, said I seemed like the kind of person who could appreciate the beauty he was talking about. So I sat up front and did not enjoy the flight in the least because all I could think about, as we bumped through low thin clouds, was how easy it would be to push the yoke fully forward, sending me and the pilot and the six other passengers plunging into all that beauty. I sweated and bit the inside of my cheek and sat on my hands and glanced at the clock on the control panel every half minute or so, calculating the time elapsed in flight to determine how much longer I had to keep myself under control, until finally we set down on the island, and my exile from Emma began.

A
nd it didn't take long, with me out of sight, for Emma to grow distant as I knew she would. Emails slowed to a trickle, and when she called it was always in a stolen moment between meetings, or just as she was turning in for the night. She'd yawn while I talked, and I would say Good night, sleep well, and in response to my well-wishes she would simply say: Bye. I could hear the rustle of the bedclothes as she moved to hang up even before the word was out of her mouth, and her haste made clear she'd been wanting to end the call long before I gave her the opportunity.

Meantime I spent most nights on the porch, listening to the coqui frogs and saying her name to no one.

I
f corporations are people, then maybe that means people can, or even should, have trademarks. With Emma, her trademark is the distance she creates. It's as natural to her as drawing breath, and therefore something for which she cannot be blamed. The thing about her—and this is something I realized on the island, in her absence, with clarity as abrupt as a punch in the throat—was that no one could ever really have her. The woman is a fighter, has been her whole life, had to be, and she does what finesse fighters do: jabs and feints, circles away from your power hand, makes you commit right then shifts to your left, never stands still, bounces about tirelessly on legs like steel coils, just wears you down.
No one could have her
. Her first husband Matty never did, not really, and nobody who came before him did either. I think we all intuited that she was impossible to have, and paradoxically that's why every man who happened into her orbit kept trying. Married, engaged, otherwise committed, single, even gay. We all tried, and tried again, steering ship after ship into the rocks, and if you asked us to explain why we'd be unable to give you an answer, except for maybe this one: because we knew, deep down, that we would fail.

Of course, that all changed when a shy and unassuming man named Peter Cash happened on the scene. But it's possible that even Peter Cash doesn't really
have
Emma, either, outward appearances notwithstanding. Maybe the difference, maybe Peter Cash's solution to the Adamantium of Emma's impassivity, is that he harbors no need to possess her in the first place.

I
bought one of the ubiquitous old Jeep Cherokees on the island for five hundred bucks. The steering wheel had twenty degrees of play in either direction before the tires would actually turn, and I carried several gallons of water in the back to fill the radiator after every trip, no matter how short. The floor was full of rusted honeycombs through which I could see the pavement pass beneath me. It was an old machine, stupid and reliable, unlike today's machines, which seethe with intelligence.

My landlord laughed, called me Fred Flintstone, his accent twisting the name so dramatically I didn't understand what he was saying until the third time he shouted the name as I pulled away.

And the way locals drove: fast, constantly on the wrong side of the road. They'd come straight at you doing sixty, then correct dramatically at the last moment, as though despite being in the wrong lane they were surprised to find themselves on the verge of a head-on collision.

Just a week after arriving I had two near-crashes in a single day, both with islanders driving as though they had nothing to live for and believed that I didn't either, and so I was nursing a low-level road rage, and drunk besides, and then I got clipped by another local while crossing a narrow bridge, sending me up onto the low guardrail and nearly into a ravine fifteen feet below. I got out, and he stopped and got out and came toward me, a big guy, but soft, fat, and before he could say a word I punched him just below the eye and felt something in his cheek give way. He went down, and I kicked him in the gut and chest, breaking two of my toes and several of his ribs. I left him there in the road, still pleading in Spanish for God's intervention and holding his hands up to ward off blows that no longer fell. I climbed back in the Jeep and goosed the accelerator between first and reverse, rocking the vehicle back and forth until it freed itself from the guardrail with a metallic groan, and I drove home and sat on the porch and waited with a rocks glass and a bottle of Don Q and a bag of swiftly melting ice for the cops to show up.

T
here were two jail cells on the island, both in the basement of the police station in Isabel. No windows, no ventilation at all, hot and dank like a drunk exhaling in your face. One got the impression that not even the cockroaches wanted to be there.

The police chief was a man named Morales. Dull squinty eyes, fat rolls around his collar, the very picture of base provincial corruption and ineptitude. He came down the basement stairs, gut protruding over the jangling uselessness of his utility belt, a thin dark-skinned lackey in tow.

How are you enjoying your stay? Morales asked in English.

It's fine, I said, more or less genuine in my indifference. I did not rise from the cot.

You will be arraigned in two days, he said. But this time can be shortened. Cashier's check. Major credit card. Currency, of course, works as well.

You don't beat around the bush.

Would only be a waste of my time and yours, Mr. Currie.

Aren't you concerned, I asked, about seeing justice carried out?

He sighed. We are not in the business of justice here. Believe me, justice takes care of itself. You and I have other business right now. But I can see you are not ready. So I will leave you be.