Radio Belly Read online

When you open your eyes again the woman is standing over you, Compassionate Comprehension written all over her face. She slips onto the bench beside you. She pets your hair, pulls your head to her shoulder. She is clucking for you, crying for you, like your long-lost Russian mother.

  “WE SHOULD GET a dog!” Jocko says, and just like that there is a black puppy, Hex, bumbling through the apartment. There is whimpering and walking—endless walking—and pee on the living room floor.

  You spend your days trying to make outside noises match your inside noise, which means listening to the same songs over and over again—sad girls with guitars, angry girls with guitars. Then you try to match the way you feel inside and outside. You begin to peel your fingers. Tweezers and a kitchen knife. The sting. For a moment you achieve the perfect balance, pain for pain.

  “I’m almost done decoding myself,” you tell Jocko. “It won’t be much longer now.”

  But Jocko gets tired of his new personality, and yours. He patches things up with the band and moves out, taking everything but the dog. You lie on the floor wondering if you ever really knew Jocko, if you’ve ever really known anyone. Hex licks your face, your ears, your hands. He hasn’t been fed in days. He sleeps curled up on your radio belly, twitching in dog dreams. He barks at the noise, digs with his paws, licks and licks. Soon your skin will be bruised, then raw, then thin as tissue. Soon Hex will eat you alive.

  YOU QUIT DR. SITWELL, and in the alleys of Chinatown find a Chinese Medicine doctor. You duck in through the unmarked door and sit beneath a giant yin-yang tapestry in the empty office. Incense wafts. A fountain burbles. The walls are lined with bottles of shiny black pellets.

  When a small white man shuffles out to greet you, introducing himself as Dr. Wally in a thick Chinese accent, you stand to leave. You catch yourself though, stopping to reason: he is three times your age and three times your age should be old enough to make anyone as Chinese as they want.

  Week after week, Dr. Wally asks, “How you feeling?” and then pins you down with needles. He leaves you in a back room for an hour, two, while your insides calm from a roar to gentle womb sounds. He prescribes all kinds of black pellets and puts you on a heavy-metal cleanse. You imagine your veins scraped clean, glittering dust falling from the vaulted ceilings like fish scales.

  Sometimes after an hour of lying on the table, listening to the pot-clanging sounds of Wonton Alley, needles in every limb, there is an upswell of something like whale music, wolf music—half whimper, half howl.

  You tell Dr. Wally about the music.

  “Chi rising,” he says. “You no worry about that.”

  Every time you leave Dr. Wally’s you feel quieted down. You try to maintain the feeling, moving through your day as if balancing a cup of green tea on your head, but it never lasts. You aren’t Chinese enough.

  “Forget the needles,” you say to Dr. Wally one day. “I need you to just go in there with your hands and find some knobs. Just reach in there and change the channel.”

  “We cannot change body,” he says. “We can only meet body halfway. We must learn to speak Body.” He shuffles into a back room and returns with a twig to boil.

  YOU WERE PERFECTLY sterile about it. No shower curtain—Jocko took that. No Hex—you could hear him on the other side of the door. You lay on a perfectly clean sheet in the bathtub and cut fast with an x-acto knife. The pain was nothing. Then you opened the wound—that hurt a little—and dug your fingers in, hoping for metal, an oyster’s pearl, something foreign. You remember a hard shape, but it was sensitive, inextricable and all grown over by veins. It was part of you. There was something like a nipple where you’d hoped a knob would be, something fleshy-hard like the tip of a nose, and all the blood. After that you don’t remember a thing. And now here you are, in the hospital with a friendly figure floating toward you as if on roller skates—your dad.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were so sad?” he asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “That’s okay. I found my girl just in time.” He covers your entire forehead with kisses.

  In the days that follow he sits by your side hoping to talk, but you’re distracted. All you can think is how tired you are. This is the tiredness that broke the camel’s back. The tiredness that killed the cat. That jumped over the moon.

  The women of your family are lulling you, making ocean sounds now—shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. It isn’t silence you’ve achieved exactly—it’s deeper than that. It’s the clean, clear whoosh of white noise. It’s static or something like it.

  Floatables: A History

  AFTER THIRTY-ODD YEARS of living on the land I built with my own hands, I am once again adrift in a drowned world. Every day the seas recede, giving back new land, but I won’t be fooled. From the safety of this crooked old boat I see the jungle vines hanging like nooses. I hear the thrum of flesh-eating insects. And more than once I’ve seen cannibals scurrying in the underbrush. The earth is healing, scientists say. Mother Nature is giving us a second chance, but the Mother Nature I know is a she-devil all dressed up in green. It’s just a matter of time before she rears up, ugly as ever, to show us all who’s boss.

  I’m one of the oldest, old enough to remember the flood, and the time before that too. I remember solid land and twinkling cities, nothing but the music and lights and perfume of civilization as far as the eye could see. I remember a person could live in such comfort at the top of such tall towers, they could go days without touching ground. Then when they did, they wore the most impractical shoes, just because they liked the look of them—shoes with heels, shoes with wheels, shoes with lights. I remember what any six-year-old would: grocery stores stocked to the roof with ketchup and SpaghettiOs, birthday parties, pony rides and my big pink bed. But all that decadence couldn’t last.

  Mother Nature turned on us. Earthquakes, hurricanes, mudslides, tsunamis: you name it, she dealt it. Then she melted our icecaps. The seas rose up and our glorious cities were gulped down, all our lovelies and our valuables too. Art and music, jet planes, calculators, schools, hospitals, malls: all went into the drink. And what got burped up? What bobbed to the surface as evidence of all that human progress? Plastic and rubber, canned goods, little packages of soya sauce and relish, flip-flops, stir sticks, Styrofoam cups, diapers and coffee lids. Such a vast and disorganized carpet of garbage that I’ve spent half my life trying to make sense of the civilization it represents.

  Luckily, Daddy had a plan. We spent our last days on land stocking a little rubber boat with everything we would need. “It’s into the human soup or die, Twyla,” he announced before we pushed off our rooftop for good. And he was right. What land remained was so crowded, so rife with human competition, it made the people vicious, wild. I won’t tell you how bad it got except to say that the lucky ones drowned.

  For months it was just me, Daddy and his briefcase in our rubber dinghy. Sometimes we would come across jagged green peaks of land, and I would plead to be taken ashore, but Daddy wouldn’t allow it. “We’re sticking to the plan, dollface,” he’d say and he’d look out over the horizon, waiting for I didn’t know what.

  Eventually we arrived at a place in the middle of the ocean where the water went around and around, a place thick with bottles. “Recognize it?” Daddy asked and I did, from TV and from all those National Geographic posters he’d plastered around the house. It was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, “bellybutton of the world,” as he liked to call it.

  He put me to work right away. I spent days fishing for plastic bottles and matching caps, screwing them up and then tossing them into a big net he’d rigged up behind us. Once our nets were full, once we had so many bottles it looked like we were towing mountains, we started tying them together with seaweed by moonlight. It was on these long, watery nights that I first turned to the moon for comfort—another kind of dinghy floating in another kind of sea. It was so full and bright in those days, maybe because we were that
much closer to it or maybe because the rest of the world was so vast and dark.

  “What are we doing, Daddy?” I sometimes dared to ask while I lashed bottles into floating bricks.

  “Building a continent, sweetpea,” he would answer, looking harried.

  I’d seen Daddy this way before. Those days, back on land, when he’d pick me up from school, pulling me down below the city, on and off trains then back up into the university library where he’d spend hours at a long wooden table, walled in by stacks of books. He’d explained his work to me once or twice. He was developing a new breed of rubber tree, a hardier version that wouldn’t need tapping. Instead of soil, its roots would survive on plastic, he said, because of a built-in micro-something that would devulcan-something else. If only I’d paid more attention. What I did know is the roots of Daddy’s tree would exude white milk that would turn to rubber, something his bosses at DuPont were very excited about.

  From the safety of our dinghy, we lashed all those bottles together, building upwards and outwards until we’d created a huge floating pyramid with a wide skirt of shore. Then Daddy climbed up, cracked open his briefcase and pulled out a hearty sapling. He shook it free of the goop that had kept it alive those months at sea and coaxed its roots around a plastic Coca-Cola bottle.

  Daddy’s plan was sound. His rubber tree took to the Coke bottle and the next bottle and the bottle after that, binding them all together until, not six months later, we had a peaked and beautiful island with our tree standing at the top, its roots sunk deep into the thick, white, rubbery ground. The land went so far upwards we had shade at certain times of day, so far outwards we could walk ten minutes in any direction. “As far as the eye can see,” Daddy said, and if you stood at the bottom of the hill and squinted, he was right.

  It turned out we had made land just in time too because the sea was suddenly full of babies and toddlers, humanity’s last great hope, set adrift. Every day they appeared on the horizon on rubber rafts, in dinghies and bowls, pushed by currents toward the ocean’s great navel. Daddy trolled as far and wide as he could, returning home every day with a new brood, becoming Daddy to all. He turned away every last swimmer, though. He was obsessed with all things mouldable by then and didn’t want anyone over a certain age. Except for Peggy O’Hare. When she paddled up to him, a pregnant teenager, so large and helpless, he bent all the rules.

  For over thirty years we rose up out of the sea like a fine white bone. In all those years, not a broken arm, not a bruise or stubbed toe because rubber can be just so kind. When the weather got bad, we pushed off to warmer climes. When the sea rose up, we bobbed: indestructible, bouncy, floatable.

  But this is the beginning of the beginning. You’ll want to know how Mother Nature caught up to us, and why it is we are at sea once again. For that, I’ll have to start at the beginning of the end.

  FIRST CAME THE smoke—three huge, twisty columns rising up where sea met sky as if the seam of the world were on fire. We huddled on the shores of our island, leaning into the breeze that had leaned on us for thirty-odd years, and watched the wind whip that smoke into secret alphabets spelling our future, that and animal shapes, too.

  “Look, a honeybee! A swan!” the little ones screeched, carrying on the way children do: pretending to be familiar with things they’ve only ever heard stories about, even as the snot runs down their faces.

  Peggy thought it was her son Vern on his way back with a boatload of the same crap he’d started hauling ashore once the rubber ran thin: coconut bras and conch shells, wood and weavery, animal heads and hides—things from the natural world that would’ve been banned in Daddy’s day. I didn’t see how Vern could possibly have anything to do with that smoke, but Peggy moved from one cluster of islanders to another, spreading her rumours regardless.

  At the sight of smoke on the horizon, even Tex, the second-oldest islander, had come down the hill to hand out grim wisdom. He knew as well as I did that smoke could only mean trouble. “That there’s an omen,” I heard him say, pointing out to sea. “Not the good kind either,” he went on, but that part was lost to the wind like so much that matters.

  Tex had shown up sometime after Peggy all those years ago—a pimply teenager paddling a tin bathtub. By then Daddy had grown soft. When he wasn’t out fishing for pickles or canned peaches for Peggy, he was by her side, rubbing her feet. So Tex had been allowed to stay. For three decades Tex had been up on the hill writing the history of our island—“The Book” he called it—and building a crooked old boat in the shadow of my museum. The boat was something like a patchwork ark, although he didn’t call it that. He called it the “Damn Thing” and was always going on about how it would one day save us all.

  Like Peggy, I worked my way down the beach that day, but with a different agenda.

  As the town historian, and Daddy’s only true daughter, it was up to me to remind people that even though our rubber tree had started to wilt, even though the seas were low on canned goods and we’d eaten nothing but refried beans for months, we must still stand by Daddy’s plan.

  “You know we used to float past other islands from time to time?” I started with the first young man I saw. “You know how green and jungly and wild they were? How filled with cannibals? And the women with bare breasts slung together as hammocks for their young? And the men with leaves over their dangly bits and an appetite for little boys’ ears?” Here I reached up and pinched the young man on the ear, just to make sure he was listening.

  “Course, Granddaddy knew those islands would drown and they did. That’s why he made all this,” I continued, laying a hand on the young man’s shoulder, guiding him away from Peggy and the others. “Every last one of those islands was gulped down without so much as a hiccup.” A silence here while I let him imagine it, then a well-timed question: “You think it’s a coincidence it’s only us with the rubber, and only us that survived?”

  The young man stiffened when he realized we’d reached the end of the beach and I was starting him up the hill toward my museum. “Now, you might be thinking our old rubber tree’s dried up,” I said, tightening my grip on his shoulder. “You might be thinking it’s time for us to abandon rubber and ‘go green,’ but I’m here to tell you, I’ve found a new rubber source floating out at sea—if only I could find someone brave enough to go get it.” Here I pressed a scrap of black rubber tire into his hand. “Now it may be black,” I said, “but it’s rubber all the same.” Before he twisted away I was able to look him in the eyes and say, “Black is the new white!” Then I headed back down the beach to try and wrangle another young mind.

  AFTER THE SMOKE came the barges: one steely grey and one the colour of rust, both with tall sides and big windows that bounced the light. Those barges rose up over the curve of the earth, then sat about a mile off shore, buzzing and clicking like jungle insects. Twenty-eight days they stayed out there, cranes and drills up to God knows what. I remember Daddy talking about barges of roaming scientists, men of knowledge who had saved themselves from the flood, and all I could think was maybe they’d know a thing or two about rubber with the built-in devulcan-what-nots and where to get more, maybe they’d have something to eat other than beans—maybe ketchup! Maybe SpaghettiOs!

  Peggy and her friends were stationed two-by-two the whole length of the beach by this point, scanning the horizon left-right, left-right all day like a bunch of scrappy seabirds. They were even sleeping down there, acting as though it was just a strategy to get first pick of the goods when Vern arrived. But I knew something bigger was going on. I heard their whispering. The last time so many had camped out was when islands had started to reappear on the horizon. These same women had thought it their place to monitor the situation then. They’d developed all sorts of superstitions, believing they could induce an island’s re-appearance with ritual and prayer. From up on the hill, I’d hear their whooping and hollering whenever the horizon rearranged itself.
I’d see their strange animal dancing, and once or twice I thought I smelled smoke. That’s back when I urged Vern to borrow my boat and set off in search of distant rubber—white rubber, I was clear on that. While Peggy and her friends had been dancing on the beach, I’d been poring over Daddy’s old papers and I’d come up with a great equation.

  Did he think it was a coincidence, I asked Vern, how much our island resembled the moon? Wasn’t the moon the only other land we knew that was as permanent and as dry, the only other piece of untouched real estate? What we needed was some fresh white rubber, I said. Then, to spur him to action, I reached into my own secret stash and gave him a taste from what might very well have been the last bottle of ketchup on earth. It had the desired effect. He moaned and closed his eyes for a long time, and when he finally returned from those flavourful throes, some crucial part of him belonged to me.

  He’d come back every few months with a bright-coloured catch of Tupperware, rubber duckies and balls, saying that’s all there was out there, asking for another taste of the “good stuff.” I’d give him a taste but I would always refuse his rainbow of rubber, sending him right back out saying, “Try harder” and “Go farther.” My first mistake: believing a patchwork island was the worst that could happen. Every time he returned he’d bring along boatloads of contraband goods—fruits and feathers, fur and bananas. One time he came back with the new name Vern, although he was born Steve. Another time he came back with a pretty little wife. And then, finally, he returned with an idea. He came up the hill to see me straight away.

  “What about black tires?” he wanted to know. He said the sea was full of them, that they were an inexhaustible resource. “Besides,” he asked, “isn’t the moon mottled dark and light? Can’t black be the new white?” Something was alive and at a gallop in his eyes. It was the same look I’d seen on Daddy’s face when we were stranded at sea all those years ago—the look of a man who’s about to become a stranger to himself.