As an indulgent self-birthday gift last december (2013) I did a sort of experiment and asked whoever had nothing better to do like, say, clip their toenails, to read a short story and answer a question following. I thank again those who did.
All she could recall were her name, Beth - though she hadn’t any idea of where the name had come from - and words without context, what a cup was, what the color red looked like, but nothing else. No place, no moment, no thing at all. Except a strange feeling that it had to be somewhere, her life, her memories, faces she recognized. The feeling in turn created a certainty that kept her oddly relaxed, unweighted by what should have been a creeping anxiety. She concentrated, trying to remember her dreams, and began vaguely seeing cars and shops and one particular street corner but the images remained nebulous and far away, as if the images themselves didn’t want to be brought out from wherever they were stored. Beth felt an urge to go there, to at least one of those places in her thoughts and so closed her eyes and tried moving toward them. But as she approached, someone’s voice pulled her away.
“Beth? Get up. It’s late. Alex is in the square, waiting.” Beth turned her head. Standing in a doorway a slender woman of about 30 with long brown hair and brown eyes was looking at her with a slight frown. Beth didn’t say a word or move from the bed, a bit uncertain if she was still in a dream or back in a reality that she couldn’t remember. Then a name, Karen, came to her mind. Karen, Beth thought to herself, slept in the hut next door. She was in charge of preparing the food and organizing house repairs. “It’s your turn to help Alex with the traps. Did you forget?”
“No, I didn’t forget. I’m just a little out of it. I’ll be out in just a minute,” Beth replied. They surprised her, the words flowing out of her mouth automtically. Karen smirked a little before turning around and leaving. Alone, Beth slowly scanned her surroundings. She found herself in a small, circular room, the walls of which were made of many narrow shoots of bamboo, the ceiling of what looked like dried weeds or grass. The air was fragrant with green, alive things and in the distance she heard what sounded like waves breaking into a shoreline. A gull was squawking nearby. To her right a loosely covered opening in the bamboo wall let in the early morning sunlight. The mattress she was on was prickly and made of a rough fabric stuffed with leaves. Beth threw the thin cover off her body and sat up in the makeshift bed.
She felt somehow younger and stronger than she remembered herself being. Looking down at her own torso she saw it was strong and smooth and dark. The day wasn’t as cold as she had been expecting but she didn’t like the feeling of the damp morning air on her naked skin. Beth stood up and rummaged through a messy pile of clothes lumped in a corner. She found a pair of blue shorts and a red top. Then she remembered that she always left her shoes by the door. Turning around, she saw them, a pair of brown Timberlands laying where she had expected. She put them on and walked outside.
Her hut was one of many, she guessed about 20, all situated in an uneven circle bordering a clearing. There were a few more a short way down a pathway that led to the sea below. The huts were nestled up about forty meters over a white beach that lined the coast. From the thick vegetation around the clearing she heard a strange murmuring of unseen wildlife. The scent of the rich, humid dirt of the clearing, dense, vibrant flora and pungent salt from the waves rolled around her nose and pulled Beth more completely into the place she found herself. People of various ages and ethnicity were already up and about, busily doing chores of one kind or another. On the far side of the clearing a plump woman hummed to herself as she repaired the largest holes of some clothes piled in a mound next to her. To her left, sitting down in front of the huts, a thin, elderly man with oriental eyes prepared what seemed to be long darts made of wood. Standing in the middle of the clearing a young man with broad shoulders and dark eyes stood staring at her. She remembered his name, Alex, and moved out toward him. He smiled at her as she approached. “Trouble getting out of bed?” he asked.
“Sorry, Alex. I couldn’t seem to wake up this morning. I was having this weird dream…”
“Don’t worry about it. That used to happen to me, to.”
“What used to happen to you?”
“That I couldn’t pull myself away from my dreams.” Beth looked up at him inquisitively, surprised at his words but before she could ask anything he continued, “it still happens sometimes.” He paused and looked directly into her eyes. “It happens to everyone, I think.” Beth turned her eyes away and didn’t reply. She noticed that on top of one of the huts a seagull had landed and seemed to be watching them. Just as Beth turned her attention back to Alex to say something the bird let out a series of loud, high-pitched squawks. The two of them chuckled a little and covered their ears from the ruckus. Then suddenly the gull stopped and flew away. Alex, bending over to pick up one of the two buckets standing next to him on the ground, suggested “Common. What do you say we go check the nets?” Beth quietly picked up the other bucket and the two of them made for a narrow path between two of the huts that led down through the strip of forest.
After descending through the thick-leaved plants and trees the two of them emerged onto one of the many small beaches coved away along the rocky shoreline of the island. The sun was now further up in the sky but a veil of clouds dimmed it a little and colored the sky itself a pinkish-grey. Alex led the way over the white sand.
Though not so tall, he was well-proportioned and handsome, with long black hair that curled up just above the nape of his neck. He went straight into the water until it covered his chest. Beth cautiously waded in behind. He looked back and shouted, “Hey, you aren’t gonna make me do this by myself, are you? ”
Though the water felt cool, almost refreshing and not cold, still the waves, small though they were, made Beth weary as she slowly moved herself toward Alex, bucket in tow. For his part Alex had already dived into the water and come back out again holding a cage in his hands. Shellfish were trapped inside. He motioned with his head for Beth to come closer. A gull flew low overhead and squawked. “You hold up the bucket and I’ll nudge’em inside,” Alex said once she was nearer, and lifted the cage high while shaking it slightly over the bucket Beth was holding. Then he set the cage back into the water, disappearing beneath for a moment. After he re-emerged they returned to shore and followed the path circling the island.
The process was repeated several times over the following hours as they completed the chore. Beth was surprised at how large the island was and how lovely its coastline. Once they were finished, before turning back to the village, they stopped to rest on a high outcropping that jetted out into the ocean. On either side there was nothing but waves breaking into the rocky shore 50 meters below. Alex closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, laying his head back slightly and outstretching his arms as if embracing the horizon. After a moment he reopened his eyes. “Just look at this view. And the air tastes… so clean. It’s like being in paradise, don’t you think?” Beth looked at him, and then down at the waves beneath. It was beautiful, she admitted, yet something inside her wouldn’t stop questioning the permanence of where she was. Though trying as hard as she could, Beth still didn’t remember anything…from before, before the Island. She asked, “Don’t you ever wonder about where we are, or how we got here? It feels...incomplete, like...”
“Like what?” Alex interrupted her. “Look at you. You’re the most beautiful girl here. Every day there’s at least one moment that..satisfies, that’s filled with magic. And we have everything we need.”
“But what about my dreams? There are places there that I feel like I remember, that…”
“They aren’t real. They’re memories of places that never existed.”
“I’m not as sure as you,” Beth replied. The two of them got to their feet and headed back. That night they roasted the catch over an open flame in the middle of the clearing and everyone talked and laughed and Beth released herself for a while. She went to bed relieved and fairly happy.
The next morning her dreams came again, stronger this time, more real. She saw herself walking down a street with other people, tens of other people, maybe hundreds, and unlike the previous night she could make out faces, could feel her own feet banging onto the cement pavement as she went up to a door on the same street corner as the morning before. Her hand was on the door, she was dressed in longer clothes and was thinner and weaker and older and then she was inside the store, looking and she was almost there, could almost smell it but she heard a sound and she turned around and she was gone, again. It was dark. Beth opened her eyes, trying to remember where she was, what might have happened the day before. Then she heard the waves in the distance. She lay on the bed a moment before getting up, putting on her shoes and walking outside.
Beth walked straight into the clearing with an odd feeling that something had changed, but she couldn’t tell exactly what. It appeared the same, huts in a semicircle, the ocean below, the forest between. Still, looking back at the hut where she slept, it seemed isolated somehow, as did all the huts. Beth could count a dozen. On the other side of the circle a woman sat mending clothes, and though others were walking about on their way to the different chores to be done there seemed to be fewer of them about than the day before. Then Karen came into her mind and Beth looked back again but Karen’s hut, once next to hers, was gone, she thought, but couldn’t decide if the memory was real or just part of another dream.
“You’re early today. Feeling OK?” Alex voice startled her a little. He was standing to her left, smiling, as he had been the day before.
“Alex, have you seen Karen this morning?”
Alex looked back with a perplexed look in his eyes and responded “Karen?”
“Karen, you know, she’s in charge of meals?” Alex shook his head, shrugged his shoulders and opened his arms. “She sleeps next door to me...”
“Beth, there’s no Karen here,” Alex declared. “There never has been. And you sleep between Larry on that side and Barbara on the other,” he said, pointing in turn to the huts on either side of hers. “You’ve got to let go of these dreams you’ve been having. I mean, you really do. Why don’t we get this finished as soon as we can and then plop over to the grotto and spend the afternoon relaxing?” Beth nodded a resigned affirmation and let him take her hand in his as they left the clearing to circle the island.
The traps didn’t take them long, not more than two hours, and after dropping off the catch in the village Alex left Beth alone a moment before returning with two large towels and two pairs of diving masks. She hesitated when she saw the masks. For an instant some images from her dreams fluttered across her vision but the effect was short lived. Soon after she and Alex were descending the steeper backside of the island to a tiny white strip of beach hidden by tall rocks on either side. He handed her a mask, lay out his towel and then strode into the ocean, swimming about 70 meters out before turning to face her.
He waved his left arm out of the water in a way that signaled for her to come along. She started to follow but stopped when she noticed Alex pointing to the mask on his head. Beth turned around and put hers on. It felt strange, the rubber, as she stretched it over her red hair, and its plastic, oily scent almost reminded her of something, but she wasn’t sure. After she had waded out beyond where her feet touched the bottom though all her attention turned to swimming. Once she reached Alex, he pointed to a small opening in the outcropping to the right and they swam inside.
Beth found herself in a lovely blue cavern, dark but not black, with the light that filtered in from the opening and below seeming to make the water glow faintly in the shadow. The air inside was cool and dense, salty and humid and made the grotto feel warmer and safer somehow. Their movements reverberated off the rocky walls and ceiling and so amplified made a somewhat eerie background to the dark blue glow of the water. “Put your mask on and look,” Alex suggested, and she did. Below on the walls closest to the opening something intensely red was growing and she could see a few small yellow and white fish darting about. Beth floated on the surface but Alex dived down into the cave and swam close up the walls, seeming to taste every part of what he was seeing. He went down repeatedly over the following minutes. Then the two of them left the cavern and headed back to the beach.
Beth took off her mask and top and let herself down onto the stone-colored towel, letting the sun dry of the droplets of water that glistened on her belly and breasts. Alex came up after her and he, to, decided to let the sun dry him off and so layed down next to her with his back to the sun. Beth turned to look at him, following the path of his back until it bridged over the firm, rounded curve of his behind and then down along his long, lean legs. She smiled to herself. With his face turned in the other direction, Alex asked, “Beth, tell me about your dreams?” Beth waited a minute until he turned and rested on his elbow to face her. He reached out with his right hand and gently caressed her shoulder. “What is it about them that affects you so?”
She breathed in deeply and tried to bring them into her thoughts. “It’s as if I’m there,” she finally replied, “as if I belong there. I see people that I know I know even though I can’t remember them. And I really want to go there, to those places I see. It’s more intense in the morning. I see these places and it’s like I try to go there but can never quite make it.”
“Do you really want to go?”
Beth turned to look into his dark eyes. She realized she was in a different place than he, could see that Alex had let go of his own dreams and was where he was entirely, on the island, and wanted nothing else. She said softly “All I want to do is find out who I am, who I might be tomorrow, or later, I don’t know. And I think to do that I have to remember who I was.”
“Are you trying to recall who you were, or who you are?” She didn’t reply, and the two of them lay facing each other with the sound of the waves gently breaking unto the beach in front. Then Alex reached over and kissed her tenderly on her lips. She turned into him and pressed her lips firmly against his, then reached over and pulled him toward her body. They made love slowly and long into the afternoon, stopping from time to time to dive into the water. Only as the sun began to drop toward the horizon did they put their clothes back on, gather up their things and head back.
The next morning Beth’s dreams seemed less intense than the day before and she got out of bed quickly. Yet as she stepped through the door suddenly she found herself outside not facing the clearing but walking in a place filled with pine and maple trees. There was a small pond with ducks and geese leisurely swimming in the water and women with baby carriages strolling along a paved pathway. Beth turned to her right and walked up to a hotdog stand. A black girl with her hair pulled back under a baseball cap smiled from across a counter. But as Beth began to reply the girl disappeared. All at once she saw the ocean below.
Today there was no mistaking: the island had gotten smaller. From where she stood Beth could see its boundaries, now no more than a few hundred meters apart. And the waves were closer, just past a thin line of trees. She turned around and to her amazement found only four huts remaining. A woman was again sitting in front of one of them, looking as if she was repairing a small pile of clothes lying next to her. Beth walked toward the middle of the now diminished clearing and looked around, hoping to see Alex. When after a few minutes he didn’t appear, she went up to the woman and asked her if she knew where he was. At first the woman did not reply. She looked back at Beth as if not understanding a word of the question. When Beth insisted the woman said something in a language she had never heard before. Beth turned away and went to circle the island.
She didn’t bother to check the traps that she assumed were still there below the surface but just strolled along easily, looking out at the ocean. The shoreline had lost much of its rockiness and was now fairly smooth, lined almost entirely with sand. When she reached where she reasoned the grotto should be, down below the only elevated outcropping that remained, she stopped to look carefully, vaguely hoping to see Alex swimming in the water. Instead there were only the waves, and a few gulls floating on top of them. She sat down and stared and considered if even he had been but a dream, but then remembered him inside her, his arms pulling her close, engulfing her. It hadn’t been a dream. Yet she was still here, and he was gone. She stayed on the overlook listening to the waves, wondered where he might be, then after a while stopped wondering and simply listened. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she did, a little before sunset, as the salty breeze gently tossed her red hair and softly whispered a lullaby into her mind.
When morning came the shrill cry of a gull awoke her. Beth opened her eyes and looked at the sky, clear, above her. She knew she was alone now, with no one else on the island. As if to confirm her suspicions when she stood and turned around she saw that the island had yet diminished again in size. Now there were no more than 60 meters from one side to the other, and all the huts were gone. There were still a few trees here and there, but mostly it had become a smooth hill that rose up from the ocean as if it, too were but a large wave. She walked down from the overlook to face the waves as they broke along the beach beneath. The gull that had awoken her followed her down and landed on a rock just breaking the surface of the water. It seemed to look at her, asking for her to do something. She looked back at first, and then out again at the water, then back again at the gull. The sound of the waves faded and she began to hear the sound of traffic along a large avenue. Slowly the scenery changed from around the bird until it alone stood surrounded by the landscape of a big city. Then it, to, disappeared and Beth found herself a strange place. She looked around. People were passing by her in both directions. The air was dirty and cool and smelled of plastic and oil. Beth herself was covered within a beige overcoat. She glanced at the faces of the people passing. They would make fleeting eye contact with her and then move quickly along their way. Beth, to, started walking down the avenue, slowly at first, but then faster. Looking at her own feet as she stepped along the pavement Beth noticed she was wearing a pair of dark brown Timberland shoes. She turned a familiar corner and went into another, quieter street.
In the following days she felt a bit bewildered, particularly in the afternoons, and still wasn’t sure where she was supposed to be. She would look for Alex in the crowds from time to time but of course never saw anyone closely resembling him. Soon the island was forgotten. Once, months later, she thought it had come back one evening when she swore she could hear waves breaking onto the shore. She got out of bed and went to the window to look outside, half expecting to see the beach. But it was only another car passing.
link -
Fact vs fiction—how paratextual information shapes our reading processes -- https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/9/1/22/1673147/Fact-vs-fiction-how-paratextual-information-shapes
2014
comment:
Though expecting a gender difference, the measure was unexpected - even in such a tiny case. On last count: of the 13 women who participated, all but one, a native German speaking anthropologist reading in English, took Beth's island story as actually happening, whereas only two of the 12 men (I being one of them) responded the same.
Motivation. In a sort of deep way, the development of how we think, of where we place ourselves in differing contexts, the direction of our understanding or representing relevant aspects of the world. Our individual grooves, so to speak. In this thingy I wanted to see a little the differences in how we identify read (prose) character, place and time, but in plurality. Hence the specific thematics and loose development of Beth and her surroundings. Anyway.
Below (and in parts 1 and 3) are a couple quick cut and pasted exchanges with a couple of people who participated, introducing a few ideas because, well, I'm lazy. (Ironically, or maybe not, the two exchanges come from the one other male responding 'yes' and the only woman responding 'no'.) And forgetful. In the unlikely case that anyone is interested in a word or two more, any notes or comments would be very welcome. The first also refers to an article on narrative (see part 1.)
To indulge the 30 year of my high school diploma tomorrow (2014), I'll finally write the post summary in two parts or so. To be honest it was a thing begun…heck, even decades ago, trying to break down top-down narrative based in what are called characters to see more the pieces, felt pieces, bottom up. But bottom-up including story - not pieces already reduced to fit into a singular narrative voice. The way the narrative was structured in this case, with a plural identity of the main character along with her place(s) and story(s), I was expecting varying results particularly between male and female. I wasn't expecting such clearly varying results even discounting for other things (all but two men, I one of them, and one woman accepting plurality but vice versa 10 out of 12 men and that 1 of 11 women - a native German speaking trained anthropologist with field work, asperger diagnosed, though I'm thinking the later condition may be more influential than the later for her 'no' in English - rejecting it.) So, where to begin as to why...
Comments
Post a Comment