Relicts & Revenants: Monsters of the Week II

A Spear in the Heart of the Sea

It was coming the whole time: a blue light into the middle of the dark and my textbooks were mostly forgotten. You couldn't not watch the TV, not with the pictures out of the satellite dish, Milan and New York and Beijing deserted, doctors in spacesuits, and then they locked us down. The cable feed broke and there was a round, sweating local politician from probably over in Chuuk, an oration in square-corner English with running crawls in three local languages, Dan's jaw behind the bar hanging lower and lower, like his soft hippie beard was trying to grow Gandalf down to his chest. The Island Hopper, not flying for the moment: local flights, because there was no other way for Micronesia to connect to itself, but nothing else, not going east or west. Nobody else besides us. As we were. Peliwak wasn't completely cut off, but at least I was cut off here.

I closed the differential-equations book as Robson turned off the TV, broadcast shifting from us to the anchor's desk on the other side of the galaxy. I stood up, and they looked: the dining room under the lanai was empty and the grind of my chair cut a serrated gash in the night sounds from outside. "Well, I guess I've got to work for my keep if I'm going to be stuck here," I said. Dan looked blank at me, eyes blown in shock, barely holding himself up over the varnished gleam of the bar. "What needs doing? Where do I start?" There wasn't an answer – there wasn't an answer for that. There wasn't an answer to any of this.

Maybe technically I could have kept sponging a little longer – I was a guest, at least until the end of the week when I should have gotten on the eastbound plane that wasn't coming and gone back to school, which was dissolved and dispersed for the duration, and California which was under quarantine and wouldn't let me back in anyway, not in a hurry. But I was a guest for this offset spring break only because Dan'd comped most of my stay in the tropical resort he somehow won in an online raffle because he was actually trying to make a go of it instead of selling it to someone who knew what they were doing, and needed people to show up and have fun and post it on social when they got back to somewhere they could get on the internet without lining up for half an hour at the post office, and it was the off season in Peliwak anyway because of the rain, and after what he took off it came cheap. Almost too cheap: I wouldn't've come if I thought he was a real creep or somehow dangerous, but designing, okay, maybe – but you got people trying to slide in anywhere and everywhere and if the Argonaut Lodge wasn't really that high-end and if Peliwak was tiny and remote it was still a vacation resort, still on a tropical island. Nothing demanded – if he'd wanted me to wear a cheongsam or something I'd've bailed, full stop, but aside from just, you know, him, and being on the same island, that was as far as it went. So I wasn't that much of a guest, and it was that much easier to go through the motions of helping out.

The Navy or whoever dive team left like two days later – military special, back to Oahu or Guam or wherever, no chance – and with no other guests it really was the motions; I cleaned up their rooms trying to stay out of Shra and Maulina's way, make sure they didn't freak out about their jobs: no guests = no housekeeping and pretty soon no hotel. Clean my own place; move room to room to make sure none of the bungalows got stuffy or moldy neglected. I spent most of the day scooping palm fronds out of the tiny pool (why, when that broad warm sandy lagoon was fifty feet across the road) and slinging a knife in the kitchen when Dan had his suppliers drop in: helping Casten do the best we could to make something new and interesting out of fish and taro puree and three kinds of bananas.

Okay, sure, that part was harder than it had to be: but it wasn't bad. It took my mind off things. I grew up in the suburbs, as assimilated as anybody else, but someone's cousin always has a restaurant somewhere and knife work is knife work – if you can strain oil in Riverside you can strain oil on Peliwak. And Casten was good people: and that's everything when you're a million miles from home, doing pick-up prep in someone else's kitchen where you're the only one who doesn't speak the language.