Under Radar (17 page)

“My father wanted to kick the guest out of the hotel, but my mother said that this would only make for trouble, and the man was contrite.

“I waited two weeks for a new set of guests to be flushed into the hotel, and I stole a good dive watch. The owner complained, and my father told him he'd investigate. Two days later, the watch appeared under the man's pillow, and he told my father that he'd found it. My father said to me, ‘That's the second time this month.'

“And then there was the third, and the fourth, and more. I stole watches, knives, and cameras. When the guests reported the thefts, my father told them to look again while he made his own investigation, which of course he didn't, and then, sure enough, everything always came back. My mother suspected the staff, but after watching them closely and asking me to watch them as well, we agreed that no one was stealing anything.

“‘People weren't always this forgetful,' said my father one afternoon.

“My mother agreed. ‘Whatever it is, I hope it's not catching.'

“To make it catch, I needed a simple delivery system for the virus. It was Stephen King who showed me the way. One day someone left a copy of
Insomnia
on a table in the lounge, with a postcard for a bookmark. I
went back to my room for a double- edged razor I'd kept from one of my thefts, and I very neatly sliced five pages from the spine; the first of the cut pages was two pages from the guest's bookmark. The page on the left ended in a thought that seemed to continue on the right. I hovered around the lodge that night, helping my father at the bar, until
Insomnia
's owner opened the book to the postcard. I watched him as he struggled with a sudden loss of meaning. He stopped, read ahead a few pages, read back. What had he missed? Why was the book losing any sense of itself? What was wrong with Stephen King? He read ahead again, to see if he could pick up King's hidden meaning. Then he saw the gap in the page numbers, and he started to swear. He threw the book away and went back to his room. My father asked, ‘What was that about?'

“I said I didn't know.

“After this, I sabotaged every novel I could safely grab for a few minutes. I knew which pages to cut in the complete works of Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Ellroy, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Rice, and Elmore Leonard. When the readers stumbled over the gaps, they went crazy. After the moaning and groaning, they threw the books against walls, into the trash, into the fire when we had one.

“My poor father; everyone was out of their minds as far as he was concerned. The world was sending him people who couldn't keep track of their brushes, combs, and watches, and the world couldn't print a book. It all made sense. There were gaps everywhere now.

“‘The mind of the world is turning into Swiss cheese,' my mother said. ‘The world is getting stupid-sloppy.'

“My father included this insight in his usual declamation to new guests. ‘It's happening all the time. That's one of the reasons Beryl and I left Australia. We could see it all coming. And it's the little things, you know, spelling errors in advertising, or your book getting to the bookstore with pages missing, that are the real signs to me that the so-called civilized world that you live in is heading for a terrible fall. And they accept it, that's the horror, they accept that in their forties their minds are going senile, and they don't even have long enough memories to complain, they don't remember what they've lost, to try and make changes in the world.” And there was a sentiment he stopped expressing. He used to say, ‘I'm not saying that island life has all the answers, but it's a better place to be raising a child.'

“But he didn't believe this anymore. The decay of the world, in these tiny manifestations, convinced him that the spreading plague had poisoned everything, had poisoned Fiji. My parents hate the guests now, and the whole endeavor of the club is becoming a bore. They think better of the natives, who forget nothing and lose nothing, because they have nothing. So they deserve the island to themselves. Because of a few pages missing from a horror novel, my father is ready to abandon his dream of massacre. I showed him that the white world has nothing left worth saving.

“‘The world is dying,' he told me. ‘And I'm sick of the Reef Club. I don't know what to do.'

“And he probably wouldn't have known what to do if the nurse hadn't found me in her room this morning. When I saw her heading to the dive boat, I went to her room, but I didn't know that she had sprained her ankle stepping into the launch and decided not to go. She was coming back into her room just while I was slicing a few pages out of
The Vampire Lestat
. I couldn't cover for myself, the pages and the blade were in my hand.

She asked me why I was in the room, why I was holding the book and the blade. I said I found the blade on the floor. I said I was changing the lights, that it was one of my jobs, going around the rooms to change the lights.

“She said the lights were fine.

“I said that one of the maids had said a light was out and I was checking on it.

“And why didn't I have a replacement bulb?

“I said I wanted to see which bulb was out.

“She said they all looked like the same kind of bulb to her. What about the book?

“I said I was just taking a peek.

“Anne Rice, she said, was too spicy for a boy my age.

“I said I knew that, and asked if she would leave the book with me if she finished it.

“She said no. ‘What about the pages,' she asked.

“‘Oh,' I said. I picked up the book, and the pages fell out. ‘Books are very badly made these days. Ask my father.'

“‘And he's an expert on printing?'

“‘He has a theory about the world, and it starts with books.'

“She told me to leave her alone.

“I found an empty hut where someone was reading
Insomnia
, and sliced one page.

“That was this morning. You saw the rest. I feel badly for my mother. You saw me get her to hug me, Tom, when the nurse was yelling at me. My mother was ready to trust me, but when I hugged her, she recognized a strategy. She may have held me close, but she was someplace else, the same place she goes the hour before sunset, after the guests return from the water and before they hit the bar. In that hour, my mother can sit on the lodge's veranda and drink her tea and watch the cloud shadows on the lagoon. By the time the blue sky is flame, the guests are already drunk. Although my father needs to show his face before dinner, my mother has, for years, withdrawn from the guests' predictable excitement over the display. It was the sunset, the view, the daily worship of just that sunset and the satisfied melancholy it allowed which had drawn my parents from Australia, but selling it to the guests spoiled something.

“Degraded by the drunken ovations for the sunset, the sunset became a movie my parents had seen too many times. Leaving the sunset to the guests, my mother learned to settle her account with the day a few hours early; she became a connoisseur of the late long shadow. This was as close as she came to religion.”

“That was some hug,” said Jan.

Eddie asked, “Did your parents say anything about the books?”

“They didn't have to. I saved my people, you know, but at the cost of my family. This is good-bye.” And with that, he climbed into his kayak and paddled home.

The
Mimesis
crew sat up talking about him. “I wouldn't have done the same,” said Jan, “but what else could a boy do to protect himself against such a murderous father?”

“But his father didn't kill anyone,” said Eddie. “It was just his fantasy.”

“He told his son. And his son couldn't have known that the father was so weak.”

Tom thought to say, But that's just what the son knew. He kept his tongue since it was only an interpretation, and no more right than any other. Wanting to know the rest of the story, he went to the lodge in the morning, in time to see the nurse leaving for the airport. Half an hour later the plane took off, passed over the lagoon, leaving the island quiet again. Alan and his parents sat on the veranda. A copy of
The Firm
, torn in half, lay on the floor.

The phone rang, and Beryl answered, then put Alan on. Tom walked away, already taking leave of the island. He knew their stay was over.

It took a week to stock the boat with food and gear for the trip to Hawaii, and in that time they saw Alan only from a distance. Jan tried to talk to Pete and Beryl, but
they retreated behind the wall that years of professional courtesy had built. They could play the roles they'd made for themselves without ever letting whatever was real in them, if anything was still real in them, from showing through.

The last good-bye was formal and friendly. Tom asked the Pooles to remember him to Alan, but they didn't say they would.

Pete said it, “We're selling the club. We're going to travel.”

“The three of you?” asked Eddie, looking for trouble.

“Alan's going to school in New Zealand to get ready for university.”

“We'd like to say good-bye.”

“We'll tell him.”

...

The
Mimesis
had been at sea for two days when Alan climbed out of the spinnaker bag.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I couldn't go to New Zealand. I couldn't go to school.”

“This is bad,” said Eddie. “I have to take you back.”

“Please don't,” said Alan. “They want to get rid of me, and now I'm gone. They don't care.”

“This is kidnapping,” said Jan.

“But they don't know I'm here. Before I slipped onto the
Mimesis
, I took a skiff and towed the kayak into the channel and let it go. They'll have seen by now that the
kayak is missing. They'll figure I paddled away and either killed myself or was washed overboard by a wave. They won't look for me with you. I have a lot of skills. I can fix anything. I want to see the world and pay my own way. I have my passport. I'm old enough.”

Tom doubted this, but Jan and Eddie accepted what the boy said.

“Will you ever look them up and tell them what happened?” asked Jan.

“I haven't thought about it.”

“Someday, when you're older and you've learned to forgive them, you should find them and tell them about yourself.”

“I'm not ready for that yet.”

Tom asked why he didn't want to go to school in New Zealand.

“They put me on the phone with the school's rector. I couldn't stand him. He asked me about the books I've been reading and how they had gotten to an island without a bookstore or library; what team sports I'd be interested in playing at the school; and whether I was really fluent in Fijian, and if I was, would I speak some to him, because he spoke Maori and he wanted to see if they were close. I told him about the nurse in Fijian, but he didn't understand. I can't go there. I can't go there. I know it. I just can't.”

On the watch that night, with nothing between the boat and Hawaii, Tom thought about the headmaster and what he must have said, and what he might have thought
of this boy. Tom imagined that the man would have worried about Alan's years on the island, between cultures, neither American nor Australian nor truly of the old colonial society, leaving him with a distant perspective and no solid self, no single identity inside of him, no source of confidence to build connections to new people. Tom imagined that an insightful headmaster would see Alan as an unfortunate loner, too old to be changed by one year of school. Tom imagined that the headmaster would try, though, because that was his job. Tom assigned the headmaster a wife whose grandfather had a mission in Tonga, where her father still ran an inn.

He imagined the headmaster saying to Alan, “My wife loves the islands.”

To which Alan responds, “You don't?”

“Oh, when I was young, yes. I don't need to see them anymore. I've been there, you know? Palm trees, lagoons, the whole advertisement come to life. And the sun, I'm afraid I had a bit too much when I was the vagabond. The little moles on my back are spreading. If we knew then what we know now about melanoma, I would have worn long sleeves all the time. Anyway, that's all past. Now, when we can, we head straight to Sydney, and every other year we visit friends in San Francisco. New Zealand is backwater enough and island enough for me.”

The outboard grumbled in the swell as Tom climbed into the dinghy. The waves, five feet, small whitecaps, pitched the rubber boat into the
Mimesis
and lifted the screw out of the water. Spinning in the air, it made a desperate complaint. Alan, sitting low in the stern, held fast to the tiller. Tom rode in the front for balance.

“Are you sure you can make it back?” asked Tom.

“I grew up on the sea. This is nothing.”

Jan gave Alan the handheld GPS with the catamaran's position already set. They would meet back at this spot after Alan dropped Tom at a safe place in Honolulu Harbor. Then the
Mimesis
would enter the harbor, where Alan and the Dodges would register with customs. If Tom's passport, when it went through the American computers at customs, betrayed him as a felon convicted overseas, they would all be in trouble.

Tom knew there might even be a warrant out for his arrest, but not for the murder. Someone from the old Paul Farrar days might have come clean about the crime, or
one of the good marriages unraveled and, in the rending, a lawsuit over community property unburied a numbered account, and too much money, and taxes due. Tom, a convicted murderer, could have taken blame for the whole conspiracy. Better to drive him up into a harbor in a small rubber boat, under radar's sweep of the sea. Even if the
Mimesis
was spotted by the coast guard, the inflatable was invisible.

With a signal from Jan, Eddie kicked the
Mimesis
's diesel into gear, and the cat made headway, against the chance that a twist of the sea would bring the dinghy hard against one of the hulls. They were safely away, and under power, the boat accepted the weight of the men gracefully and rode the waves with less anxiety.