destroy it and I will not lie. (Nothing is worse than lying to yourself.
Something else in the was-it-a-dream category, but I do not think it was. I was lying on my back on the sand, looking up at the stars with Langi beside me asleep, and I saw a UFO. It was somewhere between me and the stars, sleek, dark, and torpedo shaped, but with a big fin on the back, like a rocket ship in an old comic. Circled over us two or three times, and was gone. Haunting, though.
It made me think. Those stars are like the islands here, only a million billion times bigger. Nobody really knows how many islands there are, and there are probably a few to this day that nobody has ever been on. At night they look up at the stars and the stars look down on them, and they tell each other, “They’re coming!”
Langi’s name means “sky sister,” so I am not the only one who ever thought like that.
F
ound the temple!!! Even now I cannot believe it. Rob has been looking for it for five years, and I found it in six weeks. God, but I would love to tell him!
Which I cannot do. I gave Langi my word, so it is out of the question.
We went swimming in the little bay. I dived down, showing her corals and things that she has probably been seeing since she was old enough to walk, and she showed the temple to me. The roof is gone if it ever had one, and the walls are covered with coral and the sea creatures that look like flowers; you can hardly see it unless somebody shows you. But once you do it is all there, the long straight walls, the main entrance, the little rooms at the sides, everything. It is as if you were looking at the ruins of a cathedral, but they were decked in flowers and bunting for a fiesta. (I know that is not clear, but it is what it was like, the nearest I can come.) They built it on land, and the water rose, but it is still there. It looks hidden, not abandoned. Too old to see, and too big.
I
will never forget this: how one minute it was just rocks and coral, and the next it was walls and altar, with a fifty-foot branched coral like a big tree growing right out of it. Then an enormous gray-white shark with eyes like a man’s came out of the shadow of the coral tree to look at us, worse than a lion or a leopard. My God, was I ever scared!
When we were both back up on the rocks, Langi explained that the shark had not meant to harm us, that we would both be dead if he had. (I cannot argue with that.) Then we picked flowers, and she made wreaths out of them and threw them in the water and sang a song. Afterward she said it was all right for me to know, because we are us, but I must never tell other
S
he has gone to the village to buy groceries. I asked her whether they worshiped Rob’s God in the temple underwater. (I had to say it like that for her to understand.) She laughed and said no, they worshiped the shark god so the sharks would not eat them. I have been thinking about that.
It seems to me that they must have brought other gods from the mountains where they lived, a couple of thousand years ago, and they settled here and built that temple to their old gods. Later, probably hundreds of years later, the sea came up and swallowed it. Those old gods went away, but they left the sharks to guard their house. Someday the water will go down again. The ice will grow thick and strong on Antarctica once more, the Pacific will recede, and those murderous old mountain gods will return. That is how it seems to me, and if it is true I am glad I will not be around to see it.
I do not believe in Rob’s God, so logically I should not believe in them either. But I do. It is a new millennium, but we are still playing by the old rules. They are going to come to teach us the new ones, or that is what I am afraid of.
V
alentine’s Day. Mary passed away. That is how Mom would have said it, and I have to say it like that too. Print it. I cannot make these fingers print the other yet.
Can anybody read this?
Langi and I had presented her with a wreath of orchids, and she was wearing them. It was so fast, so crazy.
So much blood, and Mary and the kids screaming.
I had better backtrack or give this up altogether.
There was a boar hunt. I did not go, remembering how sick I had been after tramping through the jungle with Rob, but Langi and I went to the pig roast afterward. Boar hunting is the men’s favorite pastime; she says it is the only thing that the men like better than dancing. They do not have dogs and do not use bows and arrows. It is all a matter of tracking, and the boars are killed with spears when they find them, which must be really dangerous. I got to talk to the king about this hunt, and he told me how they get the boar they want to a place where it cannot run away anymore. It turns then and defies them, and may charge; but if it does not, four or five men all throw their spears at once. It was the king’s spear, he said, that pierced the heart of this boar.
Anyway, it was a grand feast with pineapples and native beer, and my rum, and lots of pork. It was nearly morning by the time we got back here, where Mary was asleep with Mark and Adam.
Which was a very good thing, since it gave us a chance to swim and otherwise freshen up. By the time they woke up, Langi had prepared a fruit tray for breakfast and woven the orchids, and I had picked them for her and made coffee. Little boys, in my experience, are generally cranky in the morning (could it be because we do not allow them coffee?), but Adam and Mark were sufficiently overwhelmed by the presence of a brown lady giant and a live skeleton that conversation was possible. They are fraternal twins, and I think they really are mine; certainly they look very much like I did at their age. The wind had begun to rise, but we thought nothing of it.
“Were you surprised to see me?” Mary was older than I remembered, and had the beginnings of a double chin.
“Delighted. But Pops told me you’d gone to Uganda and you were on your way here.”
“To the end of the earth.” (She smiled, and my heart leaped.) “I never realized the end would be as pretty as this.”
I told her that in another generation the beach would be lined with condos.
“Then let’s be glad that we’re in this one.” She turned to the boys. “You have to take in everything as long as we’re here. You’ll never get another chance like this.”
I said, “Which will be a long time, I hope.”
