He had gone to the island to die – or to
disappear. He would decide as the minutes,
the hours, days, weeks unfolded like a map.
He had chosen the month of August
assuming that, because of the tropical
heat, there would be fewer visitors then.
He had chosen to go to that island
in particular because it was where
his ancestors had been taken in chains.
Although the noisy air conditioning
in his room was on full power the air smelt
of damp and of plants. He switched the machine off,
opened the balcony doors, and stepped out
into the sunlight, and the heat. Before him,
perhaps no more than fifty feet away,
was what appeared to be pristine jungle.
He could smell the exotic vegetation.
To his left he could see the silvery beach,
and the Caribbean a shining turquoise –
to his right, on the next balcony,
a woman in a wheelchair. Though her face
was mostly obscured by an elegant hat,
he noticed her skin was the colour
of amber – and that, despite the heat,
she was wearing long white cotton gloves.
She seemed to be asleep. He withdrew quickly.
Naively he had not thought about neighbours.
The hotel was full of guests. On that island
in the month of August hotels catered
for conferences. The one next to his –
vast, modern, and gleaming with reflective glass –
was hosting Gospel Churches of the Delta.
Though some delegates were accommodated
in his hotel, sleeping and eating there,
morning, afternoon and most of the evening
the place was empty but for members of staff,
himself, and the woman in the wheelchair.
He had hoped therefore to find somewhere tranquil
to think through in detail the whys and wherefores,
the ways and means of his disappearance
or death, but the woman moved her wheelchair –
through dull corridors, across shabby lounges,
on worn pathways between the coconut palms –
like a Para-Olympic athlete,
with speed and precision, being able to stop
and turn on a dime. He understood the gloves
now, giving her extra thrust. She seemed
to wear a different colour every day: blue
yesterday, today red, white tomorrow?
Was she a patriot, or a joker,
in her own private circle of hell?
He studied the conference delegates
at breakfast. They did not seem particularly
blessed or enraptured – then suddenly realised
that it had been his obsession with
the minutiae of other people’s souls,
their internal lives, that had brought him here,
and that he was becoming obsessed with his
new neighbour, as he had started to think
of the woman in the wheelchair.
It was not the accumulation per se
of all the years of pettiness, pathos,
horror he had heard in the confessional
which had undone him, but the fact that if he,
only feet away from these suffering souls,
could do nothing to help except regurgitate
platitudes in that mega city, what chance
had an abstraction somewhere beyond.
In the early hours of the fourth morning
before the air conditioning was needed
to prevent his room becoming too warm,
using the hotel stationery he began
a mind map – in his precise almost
miniature calligraphy – of the ways
he might disappear or die, and realised
he could only effectively do
the former if he first did the latter.
Unsure how he felt about his choices
reduced by half, he showered, went to breakfast
taking the carefully folded map with him.
He decided that if he walked quickly
behind the woman in the wheelchair
she would always be more or less out of sight.
She must have changed direction at some point
because they met on one of the pathways
through the palms. ‘Coming through’, she called out
charmingly, and, smiling, ‘Thank you so much’,
as she passed him. He stood to one side,
like a retainer, unable to speak.
He noticed she was wearing the white gloves.
Eventually he found somewhere quiet
to contemplate his destiny. The hotel
was on the south east coast of the island
so faced the sun for much of day.
In the late afternoon, looking for shade,
he walked along the beach towards where the sand
and the jungle met. He found an ancient
baobab tree, took shelter in a vast cleft
in its trunk, and unfolded the mind map.
As he studied it, he remembered reading
that baobabs could live for a thousand,
two thousand years, that they had grown here
from seeds drifting across the Atlantic,
following the currents from West Africa,
on the base line of that triangular trade –
and realised his map took no account
of accidents, coincidents, irony.
He decided to bury it. As he dug
he looked up suddenly. A sting ray,
perhaps twenty feet across, had risen
from the sea barely fifty yards away,
on its giant wings of pectoral cartilage.
As it dived another rose, and another.
He got to his feet. He had to tell someone.
He would tell the woman in the wheelchair.
By David Selzer