Hawaii

“She had to go to an island,” he muttered to himself.  David sat at the end of the hotel bed – his eyes glued to the television, his mind awash with a cascading flow of fond memories, bitter regrets, and the promise of impending demise.  Every now and again his tumultuous trance was interrupted by the ever increasing volume of his wife’s voice, as she berated an unfortunate human being on the other end of her cell phone.  But inevitably, his turbulent subconscious would overcome the ambient clamor within the four walls about him, and he would slip back into a silent, distressing coma, as a man too tired from fighting the current is slowly dragged to the bottom of the sea.

            “What do you mean, ‘There’s no way off the island?!'” asked a highly exasperated voice in a faux Polynesian accent, mocking the speaker on other end of the line.  “There are no boats, no helicopters, no goddamn skidoos?!” she shouted into the phone.  There was a long pause.  Wearing nothing but flip-flops and a flower-print bikini, the woman paced the hotel room floor with one hand white-knuckled about her phone and the other flat-palmed against her forehead.  Her shoulder-length, chestnut hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but the morning’s events caused several tendrils to come loose and dangle about her face.  She was tall, slender, fit.  She worked hard at the gym, and it showed.  An attractive woman, David’s wife was, by all standards — even as she completely unraveled on this, the last day of her life.

            David turned his blank gaze from the television to the glass doors on his left.  The sky was a pale blue, dotted with patches of great white clouds moving eastward.  The ocean below stretched out beyond the limitations of his sight — a dimpled grey sheet of infinite water, lapping gently at the golden shoreline.  To his wife’s credit, it was a gorgeous view — a picturesque seen of a remote island beach, framed by the sliding glass doors of the hotel room balcony.  It was his idea to go on vacation — a chance to reconnect, a chance to leave behind the kids, a week away from headaches and especially her work.  Long hours she spent at the office.  Some nights she never made it home.  He decided they should get away.  She chose an island.

            “Well then what are we supposed to do?!” came a screech.

            David looked up at his stress-ridden wife.  She was frantic, ever pacing.  She paid him no mind, but he continued to stare.  He noted her messy hair.  He ogled her breasts, convulsing with each spastic movement.  His eyes wandered lower.  He wanted to grab her, rip the phone from her hand, and bed her that very second.  She would never allow for it.  And considering the imminent doom which thundered toward them at six-hundred miles per hour, the timing was hardly appropriate.  But whether it stemmed from shock, love, lust, or disgust… “I want to have sex.  Right now,” he murmured.

            “What, David?” snapped the woman, stopping her perpetual motion.  She held one hand over the receiver and whispered sternly— her face red and austere.  “I’m trying to get us off this fucking island, and you’re just sitting there mumbling to yourself like an idiot.”  She turned around, walked into the bathroom, and slammed the door.

            David returned to the television, where the local news station had long since interrupted the regularly scheduled broadcast.  In his stupefaction he heard passing phrases — fault line, epicenter, high ground.  He saw talking heads with grave countenances, diagrams, stock footage of horrifying Nature, and a red ticker with bright white letters scrolling across the bottom of the screen.  He was staring at the broadcast of his own death, and yet nothing registered in his brain.

             Instead, David played memories of his family life across the white screen of his mind like an old film projector.  He saw his wife for the first time, again.  She was young and gorgeous, principled and driven.  She was passionate — for life and for people.  It was that passion that first drew them to one another.  They were going to save the world together.  He would become a doctor, capable of saving lives in every corner of the earth.  She would become a social worker, dedicated to supplying the less fortunate with the basic necessities of life.

               And they did just that, only not.  He became a doctor, and she became a social worker, and pregnant.  The plains of Africa were traded for New Jersey suburbs.  His tribal patients traded for stuffy-nosed children and strep throat, her social conscience for a ledger.  They would hold each other late at night, when the babies were asleep, and wonder what could have been.  Then they would make love.

            The television blared an obnoxious, high-pitched buzzing, followed by words of instruction from a faceless, static voice airing over video of coastal wastelands.  But David just turned to the ocean.  Over its gray canvas he saw birthday parties and kindergarden graduations.  He saw his daughters in the backyard on an aluminum jungle-gym, with skinned knees and dirty faces.  His saw his wife by the fence, beautiful as usual, laughing with his neighbor Steven, as they watched the kids play.  He missed those simple days, before her promotion, before her work consumed her.

            David slid open the glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.  On the beach not a soul could be found.  A flock of gulls pecked at unseeable treasures below the surf.  They hunted and flew, flew and hunted, together in faultless harmony, without a care in the world or for the world.  He took a deep breath.  The vista was altogether perfect — not a rumor, not a whisper of harm could be perceived.  And there, completely alone in the world, did David wonder how such calamity could be allowed to so unexpectedly assail such perfection.

            It was just two weeks prior when David had watched from beneath the blankets as his wife slipped quietly through the bedroom door a little past 2:00 am.  She carried her heels in one hand, and softly set her briefcase to the floor beside the dresser.

            “It’s after two,” he said, breaking a heavy silence, startling the woman.

            “Jesus, David, you scared me,” she said with a heavy sigh.  “I was trying not to wake you.  I’m sorry.”  She walked into the bathroom, shut the door halfway, and turned on the light.

            “You know I can’t sleep when you’re not home.  Especially when you’re at work,” he called out to her.

            Lying in bed, David stared at his wife through the opening in the doorway.  With her back to him, she slid off her black dress, revealing black lacy undergarments.  She unhooked her bra deftly and dropped it on the bathroom floor.  The door closed.  He could hear tooth brushing.  Toilet flushed.  Faucet on and off.  Then the door opened.  Before the light went out, he caught a glimpse of his wife in a ragged gray t-shirt and an over-worn pair of lime green sweatpants.  It had been months since they last had sex.

            She pulled her side of the covers back and slid under the sheets.  “Goodnight.  Love ya,” she whispered to David with a peck on the forehead.  She rolled over, tucking the blankets up to her chin.

            David lay on his back.  He blinked wildly in the darkness until his eyes at last adjusted to the orange light of the street lamp that streamed in through a crack in the curtains.  But the light seemed to get brighter, and brighter still with each passing second he spent alone next to his wife, until it was almost blinding.  He sprang from the bed and moved to the window.  Parting the curtains, he looked down upon the street.  It was completely empty, save the orange light casting a sickly glow upon the cars and neighboring houses, reflecting exponentially off every lane of glass.

            “You know I hate it when you’re at the office so late,” he spoke, loud enough to wake her in case she had indeed fallen asleep so swiftly.  “I understand that it’s your job,” he continued, still gazing out onto the orange world, “but this is our marriage.  And I think that’s just a little bit more important.”

            His wife leaned up on her elbows.  Casting of the covers, she then folded her legs and sat upright with her hands upon her knees.  “David, this isn’t about work,” she said calmly.

            “Then what is this about?” he asked without facing her.

            “I think we just want different things,” she responded, ever calm.  Eerily calm.                               Different things.  The words reverberated in his head — the first hammer blow in the forging of his marriage’s coffin. “Different things,” he whispered.

            “Different things out of life,” said the woman to his left.  “In your heart, you still want to change the world.  You want to save everybody.  I’m just not interested in that anymore.”

            Another hammer blow.

     “All I want,” began David, fighting to overcome the knot in his throat.  “All I’ve ever wanted was you.”

           The room went silent.

           David turned to face his wife for the first time in what seemed to be an hour.  There she sat stone silent, motionless as the Buddha himself, bathed in the orange light rushing through the curtains.  Not a tear shed, not a twitch of remorse on her face.

            David leaped to her side.  “Let’s get away,” he almost shouted, his eyes as wide as they could open.  “A week away – away from the kids, and work.  Just you and me.”

            The room was silent.

            “Please, baby, let’s go somewhere,” he pleaded.  “It can’t hurt.  We can make this work.”  The woman said nothing.  Instead, she turned her back and stretched out upon the bed.  It was only moments before David could hear the steady rhythm of her sleeping breath.

            The final hammer fall.

            David fell back to his pillow.  Staring up at the orange ceiling, he slipped into a catatonic state – a blank, thoughtless stupor, as wave after wave of alternating grief and anger eroded the beachhead of his consciousness.

            From the hotel room behind him the television blared once more the warning buzzer.  David strained his eyes in an impossible effort to espy the approaching wave – the remarkable punctuation to their hitherto unremarkable time away together.  “‘Let’s go to an island,’ she said,” he said to nobody.  His wife had woken him up the very next morning with the sentence – reticent, but willing nonetheless to go away with David in a Hail Mary attempt to save their waning relationship.

            “… Move to high ground…” The static voice of warning slipped into David’s ear and pierced his introspective bubble.  “… All residents on the minor islands should move immediately to higher elevations.  If evacuation is impossible, repeat, seek safety in higher elevations…”

            David swallowed.  The urgency of the present crashed upon him.  “That’s what we have to do,” he spoke again to nobody.  “We have to – I have to save this marriage.  Right now.”  With a clarity he had not felt in months, David sped into the room.  He searched frantically for his shoes and wallet.

            “… As it approaches, the wave will reach over twelve-hundred feet in height…” came the voice.

            David did the subtraction.  The island topped off at eight-hundred feet above sea level.  “Carry the one…” he said with a sarcastic smirk, “…and we’re fucked.  Let’s get out of here.”  He burst into the bathroom, where his wife sat on the toilet, still on the phone.

            “What the hell are you doing, David!” she shrieked.  Her eyes were red, her cheeks glossy with a film of tears.  “I’m on the phone!”

            “We’re getting out of here,” he said sternly.  “They can’t help us.  Put the phone down.”

            “No, David…”

            He wrenched the phone from her hand and threw it into the sink.  “Jennifer?” came a man’s voice from the phone.  But nobody answered, for David had pulled his wife to her feet and rushed her out the door and down the hotel hallway.

            “What are you doing?!” she protested as they exploded through the back exit.

            “I’m saving us,” he said like a man possessed.  To the foot of a small, densely foliaged hill he dragged her.  He looked up the hill, then at his wife.  She was trembling and weeping, and beautiful as ever.  He kissed her firmly, then heaved her to his shoulder.  “Up ya go.”

            Then he climbed.  Through ferns and high grass, under the palm canopy.  She kicked and squirmed with every step.  But he was undeterred.  How many times had he imagined this moment – the moment when he took charge, when he would right the course of their wayward ship!  He had dreamed of showing up at her work, kissing her like Clark Gable, and whisking her off to their bedroom for a night of body-shattering passion.  This was his moment.  Maybe they could make love at the hilltop… “As the waves come raining down upon us…”

            “David! Stop!  You’re insane!” she screamed.  “Put me down.”

            “No,” he stated.  “I’m saving you.  I’m saving us.”  Sweat poured down his face.  His muscles burned.  His vision blurred.  “Remember our first vacation?” he called out. For a moment David forgot his exhaustion as he was lost in reverie – he and his young bride, hiking up New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock.  At the bare rock summit they had held themselves in each other’s arms, overlooking the bucolic countryside, no end in sight to their love.

            “David!”  His body was on the verge of collapse.  But up ahead, a clearing – the top of the hill.

            The wind picked up.  The trees began to sway, then whip about ferociously.  They had made it.  The pinnacle of the island – four-hundred feet below safety.  He set her down and gripped by the shoulders the madwoman that was his wife.

            “I’ll be damned if we die like that, the way that we were,” he shouted like a movie hero over the cacophony of wind and water.  “You’re my wife.  I love you.  And maybe I haven’t been supportive enough of your career.  But whether you’re home or at work or on the other side of the goddam world, I will love you.”  The hilltop was a frenzy.  Nature, the World, the Universe was collapsing around David, yet he stared unaffected into the eyes of his wife.  “I love you,” he cried out.

            The sky was as blue as ever.  The sun shone unveiled at its zenith, and yet a storm was bearing down upon David and his overwrought wife.  Palm trees bent and creaked about them.  A swelling roar arose in the distance.  Yet David remained steadfast.  “I love you,” he cried out again all the louder.

            His wife’s eyes welled up.  She smiled, and took his hands in hers.  Then she kissed him, softly, on the cheek.  “David, I…”  She stopped, swallowed hard and bowed her head.  The wind took up her hair in every direction.  She was a wreck, a woman in shambles, and yet he pined for her.  “Jesus, David,” she said, looking up, still smiling through her tears, “I’m having an affair.”

            Then all went silent.  David was swallowed up, consumed by the wave.  He didn’t struggle, didn’t strain.  He was tired of fighting.  He closed his eyes.  He slipped away, taken by the current to the bottom of the sea, and he slept.