Love in the Time of Disconnect(ing)

 

You might get out through all the waves and rocks

Into the middle of the poem to touch them

But when you’ve tried the blessed water long

Enough to want to start backward

That’s when the fun starts

—Jack Spicer, “Any fool can get into an ocean”

Sometimes you get a choice: snatch a photo of a mongoose at the foot of the low-growing palm tree or record a song on your phone that you love and haunts the night holy.

And sometimes the choice itself is superfluous.

You’ve left your phones back in the room.

You’ve made a pact.

To disconnect from everything that is not each other and of the moment. If only for a short while.

But in doing so, you won’t remember just where you found the small bar on the beach on Barbados. You paid a few dollars, boarded a local bus, and randomly got off at a stop.

Have you noticed all your friends from islands ask how theirs compares to Padre Island, the one of your childhood?

Funny, your husband says, my father doesn’t think of Hong Kong as an island, even though he’s lived most of his life there.

His father says: people like you and me and my son never retire, and this is how he—your father-in-law—tries to say: come visit more.

Later, you’ll try to tell his father about the second mongoose you didn’t get a photo of and the song that is one of his favorites that you didn’t record.

You’ll ask him to close his eyes—and at first he won’t keep them closed, which you’ll accuse him is a form of cheating, which isn’t but somehow is, which will egg him on to do again and again, so expect this to go on for at least a few minutes before continuing—and then ask him to picture a dimly-lit bar with a small stage on which a band is taking requests from the audience, and you are thinking how you never forget Hong Kong is an island, that its winding, humid streets never let you forget that no matter how inland, you are never inland, even in that nine-story monster of a mall in which your husband’s mother loves to visit with you, when she takes your hand or your arm, or keeps a firm palm on the small of your back, as if you might lose her at any moment to the sea, which your father-in-law just can’t see even when he’s looking over it on the rooftop of his building, and at your wedding on Padre Island after your own family and friends had too much to drink and took your wedding to a neighboring bar on the beach, you turned to your father-in-law and said you understood him perfectly, that for him, this island was an island and also like the island he’d want to be in the saying a man is an island, and he’d stared at you for a moment and then laughed and said, yes, that’s it!, that’s it!, but would forget the next morning what had transpired of island and fathers and daughters-to-be and being.

The story, like everything else with you, has gone elsewhere.

He’ll open his eyes and say: So what was the song?

You’ll say, stubbornly: You haven’t even asked about the first mongoose.

*

Mongoose, you say.

You’re swimming in the ocean. The water is very clear—clearer than any water you’ve ever been in. Fish are everywhere. Tiny, long, clear fish. Thin-bodied, diamond-shaped black ones. Turtles have been reported at another beach nearby, though you haven’t seen one yet. Your husband’s feet can still touch the bottom on tiptoe, but yours don’t.

Mongoose, you say again.

He stretches out his arms, motioning you to come to him, thinking you’re tired of treading water. Instead you flip over onto your back and do your version of the backstroke that your grandfather taught you deep in The Gulf off his fishing boat.

Mongeese! You shout at the sky.

He says something in response, but you can’t hear clearly because your ears are underwater. You keep kicking and pushing and going toward what you think is forward, knowing full well such directions don’t exist in the water. You keep at it, this false sense of going toward—until you can’t see him.

That’s when you push up. Realize that you’ve been swimming further out.

What did you say? He calls out, right behind you.

You quickly turn around, almost losing your footing in the water. Lose your footing in the water: now that’s possible. Even when your feet no longer reach the bottom.

What did you say? He asks again.

Mongeese, you say.

Mon-what?

MonGEESE.

I think it’s Mongooses.

That doesn’t sound right.

It doesn’t, he agrees. So. . . mongeese?

I don’t know. . . hmmm. . . hanging with some mongeese I’ve never seen before. Wait, that sounds correct.

What’s that? He sounds sleepy.

That’s the problem.

There’s a problem?

Yeah. Everything sounds right in that one Drake lyric.

Really.

Yeah. What’s the most incorrect word you know?

What do you mean?

I mean, what do you think sounds right that isn’t.

Oh, that time I spelled Iguana with an E.

Haha.

You asked, he says.

That doesn’t work.

Why not?

Because. . . you can’t say. . . hanging with iguana with an E I’ve never seen before.

Sounds alright to me.

Think mongeese-gooses can swim?

Why?

They’re pretty vicious.

How do you know?

I heard they are pretty vicious.

From whom? He asks.

Just around, you know. Like on the internet.

I thought we were going to try to disconnect.

I mean I heard it from before.

But now we have a problem that needs solving, he says.

It’s not that serious. Let’s forget it.

Sure, he says,

You flip back over and float on your back, shut your eyes. Once, there were days you’d swim alone in Tel Aviv. And other seas. And other open waters. You’d swim far out just to see how deep and sonorous the song of your fears. All your fears lead back here, to the moment when you would know you’ve swum to far, that you can’t make it back and have to live the rest of your shortened life with that. That you’d either drown yourself or be drowned by exhaustion, which ever comes first.

Once, you thought that’s what nerve was.

You’re dizzy thinking about it now. Sun-melted head. A cold undercurrent cuts across your bare waist. Then you feel something in your hand. Enclosing yours. Turning your head to the side, you see he’s right there, floating next to you, eyes closed.

There is still the pull of the ocean of a mostly empty beach, only this time it reminds you that there are greater, more powerful things than fear.

Moongeese, you call out to him, to life on land.

*

On the third night of your trip, a mongoose breaks into your little room. It might be the same mongoose you’ve seen roving around the place, or another part of a larger mongeese (mongeesian?) plot to see just how far it can reach into your one-room of connecting-via-disconnecting. All that separates you from the water is five meters of sand and a screen door; you’ve left the sliding glass door open at night to hear the ocean. You thought all you had to worry about was mosquitos, and what you thought were at first bugs and then some type of small birds that churr and chirp at night but turned out to be whistling frogs.

So what was that song?

Now your husband is chasing the mongoose around the room as it leaps into the bathroom. He tells you stay in bed as he creeps into the bathroom only to have the mongoose dart out; this will happen several times. You turn on the lamp next to the bed and study the screen door; it has no holes or tears in which the mongoose could slide its soft, serpentine body through. How and where did it arrive? How did it get into your little space of here-and-now where you’ve been reading the Minhat Yehuda and working on your essay on Jewish exorcisms between swimming and drinking on the beach until the sun goes down?

Or maybe it knew you weren’t being completely true to the no-contact-with-others rules— you can’t stay away from news like the fact you are living in such a time of deceit that the man in charge of your country is looking to pardon himself as well as his family and aids amid an investigation of international affairs. Maybe it could sense you’ve been a little more tired lately, that your neurologist no longer uses words like compartmentalize but disengage, from the noise and the hate and the hate that greets you even in first daylight where a tall, broad, white man with a European accent followed you to a grocery store here in Barbados—even though you were with your husband, even though you were holding his hand—and asked you if you’d like to have a drink—early in the morning—and even when you laughed at him and held up your linked hands with your wedding band, the terrible thing just repeated his question. And you walked off, you disengaged—how often this happens, but it’s getting easier now, though you’re still looking over your shoulder, you’ve always been looking over your shoulder anyway because in your twenties, you traveled alone, and even when you weren’t so lucky, you almost always escaped such men—and they were always men—and escaped mostly unscathed because you did not disengage, exactly because you did not disengage, and yet how often does the world ask so many of us to compartmentalize such encounters—not encounters but attacks—but in all candor, you never did, you just learned to live beside your former selves, and your doctor is also a woman and understands, and you sat together in the silence for a moment because awaiting a new diagnosis can breathe the fear into you or fill you with hope, but that doesn’t mean the world will change or understand or suddenly disengage with the wretched of the most wretched powers that be—yet there’s some small comfort here, that you can’t wait to tell your niece how your beloved is chasing a mongoose out of your room, the little room you’ve rented for yourselves, and flattening your body on the bed, you try to swerve and twist, thinking: when I get back to the States, I will consult with my niece on other serpentine mammals in the animal world who defy the laws of closed and open spaces. Dachshunds, say, might have future generations genome potential, and what kind of world awaits your niece, who would you risk you life for? That this is something, too. That is, before she was born, you didn’t worry about floating off into open sea—that there are so many things you can’t wait to tell her.

Let me explain genomes, you’ll say to her, when you mean: your auntie wants to be around for a very long time to be very strong for you.

And let me tell you why I’ll be as tall as you when I’m ten, your niece will remind you, and you’d feel a little bit better. That she alone is not an island, because she doesn’t have to be, because this seems to be something she’s figured out, and there’s truly no real reason to completely disengage.

A little help here maybe I could be, you say aloud, awkwardly. It comes out strange, but he understands you.

You leap up from the bed, almost full-human again, and open the screen door as it darts out of the room and into the small garden to the left.

A moongeese, you say, a little sad to see it leave.

*

Hey, he says, catching his breath. That song’s been stuck in my head.

Should we close the sliding door too? You ask.

How did it even get in here? He asks.

What song? You ask.

Hmmm?

What song is your head?

The one you requested last night.

Oh, right.

How did it go? Sail away with me/To another world… da da da da da uh huh, ba ba ba ba ba, na na…

Are those the correct lyrics?

I can say with absolute certainty they might be.

You think: Even if he closes the glass door and bolts it, the mongoose will turn into moongeese and we will have to engage.

There must be an opening somewhere, he says, following your gaze. Your much more level-headed husband who nonetheless leaves the glass door open. Your room remains partially outside with the whistling frogs and the rush of the waves. That is, after all, why you came here.

He turns off all the lights, and you settle in, wrapping tightly around one another.

Island in the Stream, you whisper.

Hmmm?

The song.

You sure?

Your dad sang that song with your mom at our wedding.

They did?

How could you forget?

All I can remember is they completely butchered some song.

Some song? He told me it’s one of his favorites ever.

He says that about every popular Western song.

He does?

Your husband laughs. Are you sure it’s not called islands in the stream?

No, wait—it’s. . . islands in the streams?

Or islandstreams?

Yeah, maybe. Islandstreams, that’s what we are, sail away with me, to another world…

You could turn on a light.

You could pull out your phone and look it up or text someone or watch a video in which Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton belt out all the words correctly.

You could do this right now and know for sure.

But you don’t.