Radio Belly Read online

  I scolded Vern that day and refused him any ketchup—my second mistake. He marched right back down the hill in a huff, and later that night I heard drums beating down by the shore. I saw shadowy figures wheeling around what could only be the orange light of a fire, the air full of the deep, sorrowful smell of burnt rubber. I closed my door tight and tried not to let my heart fall into synch with their rhythms while I dusted the “Footwear and Technology” section of my city exhibit: high heels and Nikes, CDs and cell phones. That was the last I’d heard of Vern until this business with the barges.

  FROM DAY ONE through twenty-eight, Peggy’s friends camped on shore, watching those barges. Walking amongst them with my bucket and brush, stopping here and there to paint fresh rubber over a green or brown smudge, I couldn’t help but notice how their hair was tangled into thick ropes that stuck out every which way. I noticed their dirty feet, overheard their speculation. They thought the ocean was being sucked up into the belly of those boats, that those boats were responsible for the abnormal weather and the ever-receding tides. I even overheard one woman telling the children Vern had sent the boats to save us. She’d been teaching the children about Mother Nature. I could see the pictures she’d scratched into the rubber at her feet: a fish, a tree, a cloud, fat arrows in between—something to do with the life cycle, with systems and returns.

  “Shhhht,” I interjected, stooping to paint over her work. “Mother Nature’s a witch. Can anyone tell me what a tsunami is? How about a hurricane?”

  The children scrammed, but I could see something had been stirred up in them. Who was this Mother Nature really? they were wondering. Why had she forgotten our island?

  THE MEN WHO finally rowed to shore were so different from us and from one another, it was as if they’d been burped up whole from the continental past. But they stuck together, moving as one, like the digits of a single hand. As town historian, I was persuaded to make notes. Three different colours, I wrote, pinkish, yellowish and brown. I was pleased to see they were older than me, hopeful that they were wiser. Then they opened their mouths.

  “We’re men of science,” said the pink one.

  “With awesome equipment,” said the yellow one.

  “Yeah, check it out,” said the brown one, holding up some sort of plunger.

  It was our language they were speaking, but the words were all wrong, their voices a startling arrangement of highs and lows. Accents! I wrote.

  The youngest islanders gaped and crowded around, not knowing any better than to trust men of science.

  “We’re here to take samples,” the pink man said.

  “Hope that’s cool,” said the brown one.

  “We’ll have, like, a town meeting,” said the yellow one, “show you what we found.”

  I let Peggy lead them around that day and I hung back, making notes. These weren’t the pale men of science I remembered seeing on TV as a child. These men had scruffy beards and dirt under their fingernails. The yellow one had a nose ring, the pink one shells in his hair, the brown one had inky blue marks all over his skin. I noticed that they weren’t interested in our rubber homes, that they seemed offended by my “Ode to the Coke Bottle” exhibit at the centre of town. Every once in a while they would bend down and, with small, sharp scissors, cut into the ground at their feet, but they didn’t seem as interested in the rubber they peeled back as in the green fuzz growing beneath it.

  We were standing before a wall covered with the crude math of imbeciles—A.E + B.C 4ever, Sam wuz here, and I (heart) Trees etched into every last surface—when I suddenly saw our island through their eyes; how grey and thin the rubber, how murky our gene pool, what we’d become. I stepped forward then and gave a long speech about the days when we were gleaming white.

  “Now that our rubber tree is near dead,” I said, wrapping it up, “we’ve been considering other options. Maybe black tires. The moon is mottled after all—”

  I would have kept on, but they interrupted.

  When was the last time we had moved in relation to the other islands around us, they wanted to know, and how long had we been “locked into” this “temperate” climate. It was true, the landscape had stopped changing long ago, and the climate was far from ideal, but I didn’t want to think about any of that just then. Fascinated by all the wrong things, I wrote. Then I added, Just like the Peggys, because I’d grown tired of writing out Peggy and her friends. I herded the men toward my museum. “You might be interested in my ‘Summer in the City’ exhibit!” I said. “You haven’t by any chance come across a bottle of Heinz ketchup in your travels, have you?”

  I REMEMBER THE last fresh coat of rubber laid down—the Big Pour, we called it.

  People had been demanding more land, and Daddy, always one to please, had delivered. For the first time ever, he’d tapped the tree’s trunk to get buckets of milk. He’d gathered more plastic bottles and then made a big ceremony of pouring the rubber over top, even though he knew as well as I did it could have been put to much better use. The rubber on our island had become thin. The outer shores were jiggly and loose, old chewed-up plastic bottles slipping out from under the island’s rubber skirt.

  After the Big Pour, the tree’s milk slowed to a trickle. How I pleaded with that tree. How I sang to it and prayed beneath it.

  Luckily, Daddy didn’t live long enough to see the rubber crack and peel up in layers, exposing not a world of plastic but a boggy green slime beneath. He didn’t have to endure endless weeks of refried beans or face the fact that, indeed, our island seemed to have stopped drifting much farther north than was desirable, that for the first time in thirty years we were experiencing four distinct seasons, low clouds, endless rain.

  IN THE LAST few years, I tried to tell Vern I’d changed my mind about the tires, that black really could be the new white, but he had other plans and kept his distance. Tormented as I was by memories of being stranded at sea all those years ago, I was unable to venture out to sea myself. I could only stand by and watch as the jungle vines snaked up the rubber walls of my museum, as the ground became moist and fertile beneath my feet.

  I had no choice but to try and recruit the island’s youth. No choice but to pillage my own collection of the treasures that had washed ashore over the years. From my “Modern Woman” exhibit I took Lee Press Ons and fake eyelashes to give to the girls. From my “Things with Wheels, Things with Lights” exhibit I pulled toy cars and glow-in-the-dark key chains to give to the boys. Once I had them seated all around me, treasures in hand, I’d start in about the true horrors of the jungle.

  “Do you know the word carnivorous?” I’d begin.

  I’d tell them how, in those long months at sea, Daddy would occasionally have to swim ashore for food or water, leaving me alone on the dinghy in a dark, dark sea. I’d explain how Daddy would return in the early mornings mud-caked, blood-streaked, bruised and scraped and how, the one time I asked him what had happened, he said the jungle was “carnivorous,” that it would eat a man alive given half a chance. “You must never, ever go into the green alone,” he warned and then he flashed that look—the one that meant he was on the other side of some threshold I could never cross.

  Here I’d pause for another one of my well-timed questions: “Now, after all he went through, how do you think Granddaddy would feel seeing you all today with your contraband bananas and coconuts?”

  They didn’t have an answer to that.

  Sometimes I’d let the guilt settle on them, thick and heavy. Other times I’d push it further, telling them I saw trees dripping with meat all those years ago, and people in the underbrush, wild and fearful as monkeys. I’d say I saw the ground spit like a temperamental baby, that occasionally a bubble would rise up from the mud and when it popped it would release the voices and smells of those trapped below, or their still-warm blood, or their half-digested bodies.

  Those kids would he
ar me out, I’ll give them that, but then they’d go back down the hill and persist all the same, going wild after Vern’s boatloads of goodies. In just a few short years the people had transformed our island. I saw the potted plants in people’s kitchens. At night I could hear the groan of rubber, could smell something like the wet, hot mouth of the jungle closing in on me.

  AFTER A LONG day of showing the scientists around our island, we all made our way through the rain to the town meeting they’d convened. Some claimed it was uncharacteristic rain. “Isn’t it oily?” and “Doesn’t it split the light funny?” they asked, hoping to be remembered as the one who predicted trouble, as if it wasn’t obvious trouble was already upon us. We crowded into the schoolroom and waited, shuffling, trying to suppress the sounds of our growling stomachs while the men fiddled with their equipment and a cloud formed above our heads. Bean-smelling fog, I scribbled, for accuracy’s sake.

  Just then the pink man stepped forward. With a single movement of his finger, a light came on and a picture appeared on the wall behind him. “This is our state-of-the-art underwater drill,” he said. “We used it to pull a sample from the ocean floor.” Pink man: magic finger, I wrote before being distracted by the brown man.

  He was peeling an orange—I recognized it as soon as I saw it. The peel released a fine spray into the hot lights of their machine and then the smell hit us—a sweet spiciness, an unthinkable, drinkable smell—and we swooned. Brown man: delicious, I wrote.

  The pink man started talking about mineral sedimentation, algae and plankton, but it was difficult to concentrate because the yellow man was now weaving through the audience with little trays of food he’d prepared—pineapple cut into slices, peanuts in the shell. Before I knew it, there was pineapple in my mouth and I had travelled right out of myself.

  The pink man was still talking. “... Analysis shows that your landmass has had a change of heart,” he said. Behind him a picture of a green island appeared. Music swelled—now strings, now drums, now a tinkling like rain.

  Beside me, the yellow man demonstrated how to twist the peanut shell, how to extract the nut. He kept bending into the lights and I was admiring the way they shone through him, making a blood map of his torso, like so many streams snaking toward lower ground. Yellow man: thin skin.

  The Peggys were moaning, mouths full, pineapple juice dripping down their chins. They were rattling their peanuts to the music like tiny percussion instruments, giggling at Mother Nature’s good humour while the pink man continued to mumble, “... Miraculous, the way the vegetation of the ocean floor has fused with the roots of your rubber tree.” He rose up onto his toes. “It seems Mother Nature has given you a second chance.”

  The yellow man was now passing out sprigs of lavender, cinnamon sticks, pink, fragrant flowers. People were ooh-ing and aah-ing and I was finally starting to understand what was going on here: sensory warfare. But before I could act, the brown man was at my side with a handful of what looked like driftwood shavings. “Ketchup chips?” he asked. Again, I was unable to resist, my will suddenly rubbery.

  “Folks, beneath all this rubber, your island has gone green!” the pink man announced at last. He said something about how our island would blow its rubber cap any day now, then, with his magic finger, he conjured one moving picture after another. Of barren ground. Of rain and then sun. Of something poking through. Then a whole sprouting-unfurling-reaching-creeping sequence. Then jungle with fruits and flowers the size of human heads. Then the whole slithering-crawling-stinging-biting insect nation. Then people kissing flowers, kissing animals, kissing babies, as if that had anything to do with anything.

  I’ll admit I was swept up for a moment. For a moment I had thoughts about the breathable earth, about forgiveness and all the amazing ways the world had gone about healing itself. For a moment I marvelled at Mother Nature, her generosity, the miracle of this second chance. Then, just before the show came to an end, just before the pink man announced, “You’ll all need to come aboard the barge for a few days while the island completes its transformation,” I saw Vern in one of their pictures: Vern, playing the bongo drums for some bare-chested island-types; Vern, the only other person who knew I could be undone by ketchup chips. So Vern had sent these boats. So these weren’t real scientists trying to persuade us to go green. The potato chip turned to dust in my mouth.

  I stepped forward and introduced myself, again, as the town historian and Daddy’s only true daughter. I asked the men to please cut us free from the ocean floor and then pack up their show and be on their way. We would do just fine without them. We were indestructible, bouncy, floatable, I said. All the rubber and food we would ever need was bobbing out there in the ocean, if only I could find someone to haul it in.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  The Peggys were in hysterics. Children were grabbing chips and peanuts, shoving them into their mouths. The scientists were going on about miracles and forgiveness and Tex was quoting from The Book—something even I hadn’t read because he had the only copy. He was reading a description of this very scene—three scientists come ashore to poison the minds of the good islanders. This was always the way with Tex. He’d claim to have written these things long before, but in truth he was changing what had already been put down, lining it up with reality right there in the moment. He’d been writing his book for three decades and I guess he figured here was his big chance. So he was reading away about our drowned cities, about long months in a bathtub pushing through a sea of bodies. I would’ve stopped him except I noticed the scientists were starting to shuffle and twitch. Thing is, Tex is one of those people who’ll make you question your ideas about what’s crooked and what’s not, even on a good day. The way his left side looks to have fallen off the spine, it seems he’s always on the verge of capsizing. To see him then, tilting seawards and reading about the water closing in like the icy hands of God and the bodies floating up like bloated rice would put the fear in anyone.

  WE LEFT THAT meeting in all kinds of disharmony—I know because I followed after the different factions, taking notes.

  Some went home and set to work organizing their lives into three piles—essential, not-so-essential, and junk—amazed at how easily a life gave itself over to these stark categories. While they packed their boats, they told themselves the story that comforted them the most. It was of a beautiful island that died a natural death and all the smart and wily people who got away. The next day these people said their goodbyes and we were all a little surprised by their lack of feeling as they paddled off to taste a wilder, greener world, the island shrinking to a little grey dot behind them and inside them.

  Meanwhile, the Peggys relinquished all their worldly possessions, and spent their last days dancing nude on the beaches, howling and making love until they blistered in tender places. Then they lined up quietly and were ferried in an orderly fashion to the barge offshore. We could see them standing on deck, waving back at us, waiting smugly for the island to complete its change.

  Others, who vowed to love the island and stick to it, spent their final days boxing heirlooms, scrubbing floors and wrapping dishes, because life keeps on demanding right up to the end, and because destruction is, after all, beyond logic. At the end of each day, when their work was done, they gathered to remind each other that they had endured a great test of character, that by resisting the temptations of the wider world, they proved they had honour, loyalty and a proper respect for history.

  Tex took to the water to practise his front crawl, his duck dive and deadman’s float.

  I set to work documenting it all. The beginning of the end.

  On the dreaded day we awoke to a high-pitched whine rising up from the ground, as if overnight we’d been pinned to the back of something wild. It was the usual end-of-the-world stuff, the same business we’d managed to bob over for three decades. A heavy wind circled, gathering fear atop regret atop guilt with each
pass as if we were a human stew at a slow boil. When the ground started to shake and everything creaked and groaned and exhaled a fine yellow dust, we gathered at the foot of the hill for whatever comfort we might offer each other. We complimented ourselves on our decision to stay, said it was the best choice, the right and only choice. We held hands and trembled even as our houses folded like wet cardboard. We only parted once the ground started to rumble, splitting off to take shelter in whatever places we’d chosen in our final days. Some clung flat to the ground. Some cowered against buildings, under desks or beds, each with a different idea about where to be when an island has a change of heart. While the ground bucked and slapped, we closed our eyes and prayed. We stayed that way, eyes pinched tight against the end of everything while the wind howled and whinnied, while the sea gurgled and spat, and while everything we’d ever known to be upright fell down around us.

  Eventually, everyone must’ve emerged from their chosen hiding spots. They must’ve looked around at the new landscape—all those places where the jungle had burst up through shredded rubber, and congratulated each other on their bravery, their stick-to-itiveness. Imagine that, they must’ve said, all this time, rubber as a straitjacket on something so wild and resistant. All this time, the jungle growing strong beneath their feet, Mother Nature healing and forgiving. Then they must’ve set about going wild themselves, painting their faces with mud and putting bones through their noses, because that’s what all that green will do to a person.

  I SAY MUST’VE because I didn’t stick around to see it. As soon as the ground stopped shaking, Tex and I—the only two wise enough to know better—sprinted over the new ups and downs of the land toward the hill. When we finally arrived, we discovered that, in all that shaking, most of my museum had slid down the hill into his boat. And so, without questioning the wisdom behind it, we set out together.

  Now here we are, adrift again, this boat so crooked it almost makes Tex come out right again. There’ve been times on a moonless night when we’ve had to feel around for each other in the dark, just to know we’re not alone. Days, too, when the fog makes it impossible to tell up from down, when you can start to feel swallowed up by so much grey. It brings great comfort to reach out, days like these, and find a warm pair of hands reaching back.