Island Read online

  “I went to Dad. I wasn’t there very long. He wasn’t making much sense, talking about Mom. Then he hugged me. He was looking wild and then, maybe, fragile. You know he couldn’t be trusted anymore. I wanted him to stay calm. I wanted to figure out how to get him up the ladder, off the platform.”

  “And so you were peaceful and loving, and then what?”

  “I don’t know, Rad. I told you we were in a dream. And then —”

  “You told me you didn’t know if you’d pushed him.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “I’m —”

  “A dream and then —”

  “I know.” I stood, my fists on the table between us. “I know, I know. And then Dad was falling. I’m confused, Key. I’m worried.”

  “Are you angry with me, Konrad? Angry with everything you can’t understand? Angry because life, your heart and mind, are always out of your control? Because you can’t trust yourself?”

  Key was not yet love, at least not all the time. I’m the person Key hurts when he’s upset. I’m the person who will take his pain when he gives it to me.

  And just then, the map of his face was the map of fear and his own confusion. I felt my own heart drop and my fists rise up.

  “Are you going to hit me? Or are you going to hit something else?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Smashing the pitcher not enough?” Key started to lose himself. “Sometimes I wish I were you, Rad. You can do and say anything because everyone knows you’re half-crazy.”

  “Yeah, it’s super fun.”

  “No, I’m sure it’s terrible. But at least you can feel it and let it all go. You might have to pay for it —”

  “I’ll die young, right?”

  “I’m sorry I said that. I’m only trying to say you get to live freely. That’s your privilege.”

  So the people with rough minds are free? Maybe. Sort of. But that’s a freedom just about all of us would give up. Chaos isn’t the same thing as freedom. Lack of order isn’t the same thing as freedom.

  Freedom, whether we like it or not, is organized. Freedom isn’t anarchy.

  I wish I had said something like this to Key. Instead, I proved my brother right.

  I hammered my fists on the table. I hammered and I hammered.

  And then I crossed the kitchen and punched the refrigerator, denting it.

  “Look at you now, Rad.” Key was on his feet, shouting. “Look at you. Why are you allowed to do this? Why are you hitting things?”

  * * *

  ı

  Why am I hitting things? Because I want to.

  I’m free.

  See this? This is freedom, right?

  I will hit the wall. I will hit myself.

  I want to.

  And you want to know what it’s like in my head right now? You want to know?

  It’s like this:

  …!@#$%^&*)(*&^%$#@@#$%^&*&^%!@#$%^&*)(*&^*!@#$%*&^%!*!@#$%^&!@!*&^%#$^%$#@!%^&*&^%$#@!@#$%&^^%$!!!@#$%^&^%$*&^%$#!)(@#$%$#@#$%^&!*…

  And this:

  …hammerfisthammerfisthammerfistsawfisttoothhammerpliersfistboneclubfisthammerplierssawtongsfistsawhammertoothbonespikenailnailnailspikehammertoothbonesawclubknife…

  And:

  It gets harder to live outside. It gets harder to live inside.

  And then, at last, this:

  >emptiness<

  Sadness.

  SEVEN

  Five years ago, my father tore open Key and me at the dinner table and nearly bled to death in his car. He survived his injuries, and my brother and I survived ours.

  My brother had a black eye. We both had long hair that fell over our faces, and Key might have hidden his bruised and swollen eye except he decided to shave his head. Twelve years old and his auburn fuzz, his freckles, and bright eyes — for a month he looked sort of like a copper elf. If anything, after this event, my brother grew quieter, calmer, gentler. He smiled and smiled. Not a broad, the-world’s-my-oyster smile, but a slight smile, a Mona Lisa smile, as if he were listening to the music of the spheres, music only he could hear, or to the running monologue of an actor not quite funny enough to make him laugh out loud.

  And me? My face, bruised and scraped when my father drove me head first into the floor next to his chair, healed. I think my father knocked my jaw out of line. It might click forever when I chew. Maybe one day I’ll have my jaw reset, fixed surgically. I’ll do it if only to get rid of the headaches. But let’s be honest. It’s hard to imagine the monks of Lérins paying for my comfort when their God asks me to suffer.

  I’m just guessing.

  As for my father, he survived his deep cuts from smashing wood and glass, but he had destroyed what was left of his family and practically destroyed his house. He wouldn’t fix it up to sell. We would never learn to sail or leave on a boat to circumnavigate the world. My father never again made us a dinner. He disappeared inside himself. At last.

  Poof.

  * * *

  ı

  Key and I cleaned up the wreckage of our kitchen, cleared the dust and rubble and glass. We covered the windows with cardboard and plastic sheeting to keep out the weather and wind. This cut back the amount of light into the kitchen. The house seemed even sadder. Dark. Meanwhile, the doors came off all the cabinets, and we covered the holes in the walls with plastic. That’s the best we could do.

  My father never spoke to us, and he seemed all but gone. We didn’t know what he was doing day to day. He might have disappeared for days at a time, maybe left the house, or simply hid from us, out of our sight. Key and I occasionally found a can or carton in the garbage, apple cores and avocado rinds, proof of life.

  Once we accepted our father’s absence, life got easier, even with the house a shambles. We could breathe. Like a flat one-ton stone had been lifted off our chests.

  Three months after that dinner that ended in blood, Key was riding a bus and happened to spot our father walking into a supermarket.

  “He looked terrible, Rad. Skinny, like he hasn’t eaten more than walnuts and apples and avocados since that night.”

  I tapped my jaw. “I don’t care if he starves to death.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Sometimes I don’t understand Key at all.

  “Of course I mean it,” I said. “I wouldn’t give him a crumb if it would save him.”

  Silence.

  Then, “Walnuts and apples, Key?”

  “I don’t know. Small things. Not enough to live on.”

  “We can only hope.”

  Key shook his head. “Don’t say that.”

  “Do you forgive him?”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Well, I can’t either,” I said.

  “We’re not talking about the same thing, Rad. You’re too angry to forgive him. You don’t think he deserves forgiveness. I’m saying I can’t forgive him because I don’t understand what happened. And I don’t think it’s up to me to forgive him. That’s for Dad to do or not.”

  “Forgive himself? Why just him? Why not us, too?”

  “You’re asking why we shouldn’t also be allowed to forgive him?”

  I clenched my fists. “I don’t know. You’ve gotten me confused.”

  “Don’t get upset, Rad. I’m not trying to trip you up. I’m saying it’s Dad’s choice to forgive Dad or not.”

  “Why?”

  “Whatever happened, happened inside of Dad. We don’t know anything about it.”

  I honestly couldn’t even pretend to understand what Key was saying. We have two different kinds of intelligence.

  “Are you saying Dad might still love us? That he might get back to us again? Even now?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  My
head was spinning. “Do you love Dad?”

  Key thought for a moment. “I love the Dad I knew first, the Dad that came with Mom. I don’t know the John Schoe that —”

  “I don’t think we have to do anything for Dad,” I said. “We don’t owe him anything. We don’t have to forgive him. We don’t have to understand him. He has to know what he did was wrong. He’s done nothing for us. Nothing except hurt us.”

  Key watched my face for a long time.

  “We have to keep helping ourselves,” I said.

  “You’re right,” Key said. But he was thinking of something else.

  “What?” I said.

  “He’s sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Dad’s going insane.”

  My brother went to the living room couch and wrapped himself up in a blanket. I followed him.

  “Insane? Like something’s changed him? A tumor? Cancer?”

  “No,” Key said. “I mean like his uncle. The one who lived in the hospital. Dad told us, remember? His biggest fear.”

  I sat down on the couch next to my brother. I wondered if this changed everything, everything that ever happened.

  If Dad was sick, losing his mind, when did it start? It could have started a long time ago, long before Mom died, maybe even before he gave up his job. Maybe he’s always been —

  “Crazy,” I said.

  Key nodded. “And no one can do anything about it.”

  “But there are psychiatrists. Doctors. Drugs. I mean, he didn’t have to give up.”

  Key was quiet.

  “I’m scared,” he said finally.

  * * *

  ı

  What is it about islands? Their strangeness and isolation, reachable only by boat or by swimming, or, I guess, in some places by sled or skis.

  We think about the castaway on a deserted island. We have an image of a tiny island with a palm tree. We think of beautiful vacations on islands. We think of the miraculous worlds that can be built on islands, like Manhattan and Abu Dhabi.

  There’s something very strange about the fact that islands can interrupt oceans. Even tiny islands, uninhabitable or hostile islands, have their own geography and sometimes their own weather.

  Islands are fragments. They’re pieces broken off from larger pieces, the smithereens and fractions of continents. They’ve floated off, some farther than others.

  And there are islands spat out by volcanoes. They’re fragments, too, proof of lava, proof of the earth’s interior rage and violence.

  I wish I could spit out islands, burning islands, islands that cool down after a long time and then support life. Islands with black sand and hot springs, like Iceland. I wish my emotions could give birth to something beautiful. Something that could support palm trees and monkeys and toucans.

  Whole civilizations have imagined themselves as islands, whether they lived on actual islands or not. They imagined themselves surrounded by oceans of land, oceans of mountains or prairies or sand or forest or ice, surrounded by oceans of barbarians, foreigners, people not exactly like them, but not exactly different either. We’ve never really wanted to accept that humanity is one continent. We can’t do it. We don’t really know how to be a part of a whole. We make ourselves into islands. Always, one way or another, we break away and float off.

  We’re lonely, whether we know it or not, but we don’t have to be. We could choose to rebuild the continent.

  We could, but we won’t.

  * * *

  ı

  I’ve thought about becoming a cartographer, but almost all mapmaking happens now through computer programming, sorting through information from satellites and GPS. I hate technology. Unfortunately, I also hate to draw. I don’t think I’ve ever held a pencil or crayon or brush and not felt angry. I’m more like a gorilla with a pointed stick than a human holding a pencil. I’d do better rooting and scraping for insects in tree bark than drawing or writing. I can only read maps. I can only study.

  Six hundred years ago, in 1420, a man named Cristoforo Buondelmonti published the first Liber insularum, or book of islands. His Liber insularum Archipelagi, a book of the insular, from the Latin insularium, contained maps with descriptions of the Greek islands and archipelagos, the islands and archipelagos of the Aegean and Ionian seas. He included some of the important far eastern Mediterranean cities like Constantinople, now Istanbul, and historically significant places such as Gallipoli. Buondelmonti was an Italian from Florence and a monk — a monk! — and it’s possible he compiled his new kind of book on Rhodes, a Greek island closer to the Turkish coast eleven miles north than to mainland Athens 267 miles north-northwest.

  I’m about to go a little off course. I can feel it. This bridge I’m building is growing an arm.

  I hope you like history.

  Rhodes is an island famous for one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Colossus, a giant statue of iron and marble, sheathed in bronze, representing the Greek titan-god of the Sun, Helios. It stood only fifty-some years before falling in an earthquake.

  Rhodes is an island for tourists, an island of spas and ruins. It’s where you’d find the Palace of the Grand Master, the castle and fortifications once occupied by the Knights of Rhodes, also known as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, or the Knights Hospitaller. An ancient religious order founded around the year 1020, the Hospitallers had for almost three hundred years offered care and then armed support to Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. The Hospitallers abandoned the Holy Land after the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to the forces of the Sultan of Egypt in 1291.

  They found a home on an island, Cyprus, an island at this moment contested and divided between Turkey and Greece. Once the politics, even then, got too hot, the Hospitallers left Cyprus, taking over Rhodes and a few other islands in 1309. The Hospitallers rebranded themselves the Knights of Rhodes and remained there for two centuries.

  Buondelmonti, the traveling monk and cartographer, might have drawn up his book of maps while a guest of the famous Catholic order. He arrived in the middle of the Knights’ occupation of Rhodes, a century after they took over the island and turned it into a fortress. The Knights thought a smallish island would be easy to defend. And they kept their island against waves of Barbary pirates and two Ottoman invasions before they finally lost in 1522 to a third Ottoman invasion, to the Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent and his giant army. So Buondelmonti created his maps of the Grecian islands, his liber insularum, on an island stronghold held by an armed and very powerful religious order.

  And where did the Knights of Rhodes, the Hospitallers, go after 1522 when Suleiman conquered the island?

  They wandered, more or less, until 1530, when Charles I of Spain, also King of Sicily (the largest island in the Mediterranean, off the toe of the Italian boot), gave the Knights another island: Malta. The Knights of Rhodes, once the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, rebranded themselves again, this time as the Knights of Malta. During their time on Malta, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Knights actually came to possess four islands in the Caribbean, not too far from Puerto Rico — St. Barthélemy, St. Christopher, St. Martin, and St. Croix — which they turned around and sold in 1665 to the French West India Company. The Knights held on to Malta for another 130 years.

  Then, in 1799, five hundred years after the Knights Hospitaller fled the Egyptian sultan, abandoning the Holy Land, they got creamed by Napoleon. Napoleon, future self-proclaimed emperor of France. The same Napoleon who would crush most of Europe over twenty years. He was from the island of Corsica located in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the coasts of Italy and France, and he was twice exiled to islands — to Elba, just off the coast of northern Italy (a bad choice, since he escaped and returned to power only to lose everything at the Battle of Waterloo to another great island general, England’s Duke of Wellington), and then to St. Helena, a tiny, rocky s
peck in the southern Atlantic (a good choice, since he died there). Napoleon conquered the Knights on his way to … Egypt.

  Phew.

  Hang with me a little longer about this Knights business.

  In 1806, a little unbelievably, or maybe not so much, the Knights of Malta, once the Knights of Rhodes, once the Knights Hospitaller, also known as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, were offered — that’s right — another island. This time, the Swedes suggested the Knights take up residence on their largest island, Gotland, sitting off their eastern coast, out in the Baltic Sea.

  The Knights refused. They’d had enough of islands. And they missed Malta. Who wouldn’t? The weather’s beautiful.

  * * *

  ı

  And what about the Florentine monk, Buondelmonti? He started a tradition of European mapmaking — island cartography, maps of the insular — that lasted two hundred years. A genre of maps and atlases that lasted deep into the European age of discovery — into the age of colonization; into the rise of the first age of globalization, of worldwide commerce; the long age of slavery; the rise of genocide and the deep hatreds everyone everywhere is trying to survive right now — when Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France, when England and Holland and Germany and Sweden and Denmark, all of them, all of them, sailed the world and took it over. The rise of European empires.

  Just like love, beauty takes some space for itself in the history of knowledge and ugliness. I’m not sure anyone could look at the maps created in the cartographic workshops of the European countries that took over and carved up the world, the workshops where cartographers labored with ink and compasses and rulers and dividers, and not say the maps are shockingly beautiful. They had their calligraphy, their gold leaf and their inlay, their mysteries, all their art and science, and they were the property of kingdoms, kingdoms that would put down a hundred million roads, through land and water to all kinds of heavens and hells.

  And today, the maps and atlases from this era can auction to collectors for hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.